
Class >_^. il3^^ 
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GOPXRICHT DEPOSir. 



PLAY IN EDUCATION 



•The: 



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PLAY m EDUCATION 




BY 

JOSEPH LEE 



"Ntin gork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1915 

All Hgkts reserved 



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COPTBIOHT, 1915, 

bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1915. 



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APR 29 1915 
/to/ 






M. C. L. 



INTRODUCTION 

My aim in this book is to present a true picture of the 
child. All other objects are subordinate. The philosophical 
and biological theories adopted are important mainly as they 
may serve to unify the picture and make its several features 
easier to remember. The practical conclusions reached — 
though, like any conclusions upon this subject, they are im- 
portant if sound — are of secondary interest : if I have suc- 
ceeded in presenting the child as he really is, and if my 
presentation carries conviction, the right practical con- 
clusions will be drawn by somebody. The presentation of 
such correct likeness is the specific contribution that I have 
tried to make. 

A great obstacle in interpreting the child to grown people 
is that we have no word which stands for the most im- 
portant factor in the child's life. And the difficulty is en- 
hanced by the fact that the word which we actually use to 
designate this factor has a significance almost diametrically 
opposed to the nature of the thing itself and helps continually 
to mislead us upon the subject. "Play," to grown people, 
signifies something of secondary importance : it is the word 
for those activities that must be postponed to serious pur- 
suits — that, except as they may contribute to the successful 
carrying on of the latter, may be altogether omitted with 
impunity. "Child's play," especially, means whatever is 
ridiculously easy. To the child, upon the other hand, play 
is the most important thing there is. It is primary, comes 
first in mterest, represents real life ; it is what all the rest 



viii INTRODUCTION 

is for. It is difficult, making an infinite and insatiable 
demand for power and courage. It is authoritative, re- 
quired, not to be slighted without shame. Play is the 
child. In it he wreaks himself. It is the letting loose of 
what is in him, the active projection of the force he is, the 
becoming of what he is to be. 

And not only do we call the child's dearest interests by a 
name implying that they are of negligible importance, but we 
heighten the misunderstanding by (very properly) calling 
the same identical interests when they appear in grown people 
by a variety of high-sounding names, — such as work, art, 
science, patriotism, idealism, genius, — that we never think 
of applying to children's play. For the thing itself, even as 
it appears in grown people, we have no word, which if we 
had we might extend to the case of children and so help 
ourselves to an understanding of their lives. 

In these various ways we have obscured to ourselves the 
truth — in any case difficult to perceive from our stand- 
point — that children's play and the highest expressions of 
our grown-up life are in very truth the same. I once made 
the statement that the boy without a playground is father to 
the man without a job. The truth is more than that, — the 
boy without a playground is the man without a job. He is 
suffering identically the same loss : the absence from his 
life of the chief means of living, the cutting of the main 
strand of his existence. Play is to the boy what work is to 
the man — the fullest attainable expression of what he is 
anJthe effective-jneansjgf becoining more. And in the case 
of the best work the expression is of the same instincts ; 
the two are identical — the voice of the same river though at 
different points on its course. There is, it is true, if our 
biological theories are correct, the difference that while 
the man's work only sustains life, the child's play creates 



INTRODUCTION ix 

it ; but that is not a difference which justifies our regarding 
play as a thing of inferior importance. 

This looking upon the same word and the all-important 
interests which it stands for from opposite sides by parent 
and child, master and pupil, the world of childhood and the 
grown-up world, respectively, constitutes an almost impas- 
sable barrier between the two, a barrier that but few grown 
people (Froebel, Stevenson, and half a dozen others) have 
— not crossed, but peeped over and reported what they 
saw. It is the existence of this barrier that constitutes not 
only the difiiculty, but the need of interpretation, and justi- 
fies any earnest attempt to lessen in however slight degree 
the resulting misunderstanding between each generation of 
children and those who control their education and their 
lives. 

It is true that I myself throughout this book use this same 
word to which I find so much objection. I do so, first, 
because there is no other word, and second, because as we are 
certain to keep on using this word to designate our children's 
most important interests, I want to do what I can to raise 
it to its true dignity, and make it mean, for however few, 
something of what it must mean to us if we are ever to 
understand our own children or be of much help in their 
development. 

I have not in this book discussed the general relations of 
instinct to reason. To prevent a misunderstanding it may 
be well to say that I do not set up instinct against reason 
either as a rival or as a substitute. Their functions are 
different and supplementary. Within its own sphere noth- 
ing can abrogate the authority of reason except reason it- 
self. The supremacy of reason is assumed in the act of 
thought. We must in order to think at all have faith in 
the intellectual integrity of the universe, its consonance 



X INTRODUCTION 

with the laws of thought, — faith in the persistence of 
truth, in the continued authority of our moments of vision, 
and in the impHcations of the truth we know. 
^ But morality and reason alone furnish no guide to con- 
duct. They tell us to follow the good and the true, but 
they do not tell us what these are. To know that we 
ought to seek the good, even that we ought to promote the 
good will in ourselves and others, is not enough. We can- 
not seek the good unless it first exists. Some ends must 
be, independent of our seeking them, better than others, or 
there could be no moral choice. And there must be some 
power in us to recognize, however dimly, where the good 
lies. A compass cannot point north unless there is a north, 
nor unless it has in itself some relation to it. 

Reason as related to instinct acts mainly in the following 
ways. First, it directly serves the instincts, discovering 
practical methods for their satisfaction. Secondly (per- 
haps an extension of the first), it calls up the absent fact, 
— the fact which is beyond immediate perception and is 
known either by inference or by a memor}- so dimly active 
that the fact itself is not truly present, is not felt but only 
intellectually acknowledged, and so does not appeal imme- 
diately to instinct. It testifies for the more remote expe- 
rience, for the past insight, the future reawakening, for 
effects upon other people. It brings the absent fact before 
the court. Herein reason serves the instincts by present- 
ing to them the real effects of contemplated action and 
enabling them to truly serve themselves. 

Thirdly, reason, as conscience, acts for the absent mo- 
tive, cites the rulings of some higher instinct or of one more 
authoritative in the premises as against the present, lower 
or less applicable ones, — admonishing the voluptuary of 
the existence of true love, the decadent artist of a brighter 



INTRODUCTION xi 

vision, the trifler of his true vocation. This case is the 
converse of the one just cited. Here reason brings the 
decisions of the court to bear upon the facts, as there it 
haled the facts before the court. 

It is true that in one sense there is a conflict between 
instinct and reason. The intellect may be superserviceable 
in bringing before us more facts than we can handle, until 
we lose our sense of direction, become confused, and are 
incapable of a true decision. The court has adjourned 
before the mass of witnesses can be heard. Also we can 
in one sense be too conscientious. We cannot too well 
obey the commands of conscience present and speaking, 
but we can too anxiously search for possible higher points 
of view until the time for spirited action has gone by. 
There are times when it is better to trust such part of us 
as is present on the ground than try to conjure up our 
absent though possibly better self. But I have not in this 
book intended to exalt the more instinctive above the more 
reasoned or more conscientious method, or to express any 
opinion as to the proper balance between the two. 

There is the further question of what it is that bids us 
use our reason or admonishes us when and how far to use 
it. Not reason itself, apparently: it is not always there 
unless it has been called. And when it comes, it only 
states the case without deciding it. What is it in us that 
passes upon the facts which reason cites and which we 
have supposed too pale to call the instincts into play, or 
that in the presence of blazing fact, only too plainly felt, 
speaks for the absent higher instinct? This something 
that seems to have jurisdiction over reason itself, to call 
it into action and to appraise its testimony, is partly 
perhaps the pale reflection of the instinct which we have 
called absent. Partly it is the instinct of self-assertion or. 



xii INTRODUCTION 

as some would call it, of self -surrender, — a sort of instinct 
of instincts, whose function is to keep in mind our true 
direction, to remember the word that was given us to say 
and impel us to its utterance. Partly it is the fighting in- 
stinct enlisted in behalf of this permanent and higher self. 
In an}^ event it must apparently be instinctive in its nature 
if it is there at all as a constant influence of any sort. 
t> If indeed there is such a thing as free will, in that case 
decision is a new creative act, uncaused by instinct or by 
any other thing. 

It is impossible in dealing with any such important subject 
as education to make full acknowledgment of the sources 
from which one's ideas have been derived. I have in general 
followed Froebel as to the main characteristics of the suc- 
cessive stages of growth, up to and including the Big Injun 
age, and also in the analysis of the sense of membership 
which characterizes the succeeding period. Gulick was the 
first, so far as I know, to arrange the plays of children defi- 
nitely according to age periods. From him and from 
George E. Johnson the whole subject has received much 
illumination, from which, with all others interested, I have 
profited. The biological theory of play adopted is that of 
Herr Groos, as stated in the text. 

In the arrangement of the book I have followed upon 
the whole the order of growth, telling the story rather by 
ages than by subjects, but have occasionally departed from 
that order when the expression of a particular play instinct 
seemed so far identified with a particular age period as to 
make its treatment under that period alone the most con- 
venient method, I have also stated a good deal of the 
theory of play, and some of my conclusions as to its place 
and value, at the beginning. But in general I have fol- 
lowed the dramatic order. 



DEFINITIONS 

I HAVE not much confidence in definitions. If I could 
say in three lines what I mean by play, for instance, the 
rest of this book would be unnecessary. The following, 
however, are submitted as preliminary indications of the 
sense in which certain words will be used. 

Impulse : an internal prompting to conscious action of 
some special kind — conscious as distinguished from re- 
flex, not necessarily implying purpose. 

Instinct : an innate tendency toward conscious action of 
some special kind or toward some special end, resulting 
in frequent impulses toward such action. 

Habit: an individually acquired tendency to a special 
form of action. (Once acquired it differs from instinct 
only when, as is often the case, it prescribes unconscious, 
reflex action or the form of the action rather than its end 
or than the action as a whole.) 

Play instinct: an instinct not toward a physical satis- 
faction nor toward the avoidance of pain ; an instinct 
toward an ideal. 

Play : action in fulfillment of a play instinct. 

Hunger: an instinct toward a physical satisfaction. 
(Sometimes also the pain of lacking a physical satis- 
faction.) 

Work : consciously directed activity by which one makes 
good as a member of society. 

Drudgery: activity not in satisfaction of the instincts. 

Nature: metaphor for the cause, real or assumed, of 
observed phenomena. 

Purpose of nature: metaphor for the purpose attribu- 
table to such cause. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Introduction vm 

BOOK I. PLAY IS GROWTH 

A. FUNCTION OF THE PLAY INSTINCTS 

Chapter I. Play is Serious 1- 1 

Play the most serious thing to the child — hence its 
supreme educational importance. 

Chapter II. Play is Growth 5 

Play instincts prescribe action, action induces growth. 

Chapter III. Play trains for Life 8 

The play instincts are those which govern life — the 
constituting instincts. 

Chapter IV. Play and the Hungers .... 13 

Play is the expression of the achieving instincts. These 
include: (1) the main directing instincts, (2) the instincts 
ancillary to these, (3) the temporary, and (4) the larger, 
inclusive, instincts. Does not include expression of the 
hungers. 

Chapter V. Place and Limitations of Growth through 

Play 19 

Physical limitations — the body, the reflexes. 

Play releases growth, forms the acquired reflexes, and 
shapes mind and body within prescribed limitations. Gen- 
erality of the human instincts leaves choice of action and 
of growth. 

Chapter VI. Advantages of being a Play-built Animal 26 

1. The possession of a more unfinished nature, supple- 
mented through play by a second nature adapted to actual 
conditions. 

XV 



xvi TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAOB 

2. Development of an adapting plant or mind to direct 
the play activities through which this second nature is 
built up. 

B. CERTAIN RELATIONS OF PLAY 

Chapter VIL Play and Teaching 35 

Teaching implied in the play instincts, necessary to the 
transmission of our social inheritance in play. Necessary 
also outside of play but should never supersede it. 

Chapter VIII. Play and Gymnastics 42 

Gymnastics not play. Their shallow activities impair 
unity of growth. Useful for corrective purposes. 

Chapter IX. Play and Work 48 

Work the fulfillment of the play instincts, the highest 
- form of play. Play the most serious element in work. 
Work may be drudgery except that it always expresses the 
team sense. 

C. SUPPLEMENTARY 

Chapter X. Evidence that Play is Growth ... 57 
Growth follows the direction of play and in its order — is 
stunted where play is absent. Play does not wait for but 
precedes flie powers that it trains. 

BOOK II. THE BABY AGE 

From one to three 

A. INTRODUCTORY 

Chapter XI. The Four Ages of Childhood ... 62 
Babyhood, from one to three — dramatic age, from three 
to six — Big Injun age, from six to eleven — age of Loyalty, 
from eleven on. The first two the same for boys and girls 
— the third much the same — tlie fourth different. 

Theory of recapitulation — its minor importance for us. 
Carpe diem — necessity for timeliness in education. 

Chapter XII. Why Grown-ups do not Understand . 70 
What is hard-won advance to the child is review and 
relaxation to the grown-up. Meeting the old form under 
the new spirit deceives the latter. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xvii 

B. DESCRIPTION OF THIS AGE 

PAOK 

(This and subsequent descriptive chapters are intended 
to present a portrait, not a photograph, and therefore include 
the element of interpretation as well as that of reporting.) 

CiTAPTER XIII. Mother Play 74 

The child a social being from the start, the mother his 
first world. The father — his maternal instinct. Impor- 
tance of physical contact. Language. Child's social powers 
not unlimited — the cloisteral desire. 

Chapter XIV. Manipulation 84 

Hand the organ of thought and action as well as of feel- 
ing. Man the creature of the hand — the child built up 
around it. Grasping, wielding, and striking. Tools and 
weapons. The tool a part of the person. Handling and 
control. 

Chapter XV. Construction 95 

The first cake. Pies — blocks — sand. Creative impulse 
— building in music, laws, institutions, hypotheses, move- 
ment. To do is to make — importance of its instinctive 
manual form. 

Chapter XVI. Creeping, Walking, and Balancing . 102 
Locomotion precedes walking. Child invents his method. 
Walking — balancing. 

BOOK III. THE DRAMATIC AGE 

From three to six 

CuiPTER XVII. Impersonation 107 

Impersonation not showing off, not dramatics, but a 
method of understanding. Sees things as living wholes 
and gets inside to see how it feels. Not literal nor imita- 
tive of externals. Symbolism. Robust transforming power. 
Helps to imagination. Importance of this training. 

CriAPTER XVIIL Subjects of Impersonation . . .121 
Surroundings important but not decisive. Sex prefer- 
ences — free creation — the imaginary playmate. The child 
builds his world according to his instinctive interests, which 
indicate the directions of his growth. Dolls, horses, sol- 
diers, houses, animals, fairies, giants. 



xviii TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Pi.m 



Chapter XIX. Social Play of the Dramatic Age . I;i2 

Child and family correlative. Subordination to a social 
■whole. Relations of home to doctor, farmer, carpenter. 

Society of contemporaries — importance to the American 
child. Plato's mention of the kindergarten. The ring 
game — personality of the ring. Membership instinctive. 

Chapter XX. Rhythm VI3 

In round games — in teasing. Precedes the dramatic 

age — the pat-a-cake games — singsong — Mother Goose — 

rhyme and reason. 

Swinging, imagination — the alternating rhythm. 

Rhythm the parent of the arts. 

Chapter XXI. Rhythm and Life 153 

The carrying power of rhythm — its hypnotic effect. 

A measure of time — element in skill, in social power, 
in cooperation. Orgy — war dance — religion — social fu- 
sion and achievement. Music and gymnastics — Milton — 
Grerman nationality. 



BOOK IV. THE BIG INJUN AGE 

From six to eleven 
A. DESCRIPTIVE 

Chapter XXII. The Hunger for Reality . . .166 
Disillusion, sterility, mischief. The hunger for hardpan. 

Chapter XXIII. The Skeptic i72 

Comradeship with nature — the country the child's coun- 
terpart. Dissection and investigation. Fire — mechanics — 
wheels — boats — tools — carpentry. Mischief a social teat. 

Chapter XXIV. Big Injun '^^^ 

Passionate desire to be real — cause of perpetual compe- 
tition and obstreperousness — a question of life and death. 
Big Injun — reality, not show, the heart of his desire. 
Chapter XXV. The Fighting Instinct . . . .193 
The instinct not malevolent — its varied incarnations — 
needs early development in its instinctive form. The games 
of contest — the one game tendency. Moral value. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PACM 



Chapter XXVI. Chasing, Climbing, Falling, and Minok 

Instincts 2C^ 

Instinct to run away as well as to chase. Running garae^ 
— striking and throwing games. Climbing, a passing in 
stinct. Coasting — falling — wading — quiet games — 
apparatus — games of bodily control. Need of leadership. 

Chapter XXVII. Nurture in the Big Injun Age , 

Making friends with animals. Cruelty and sympathy. 
Nurture in boys — its wide application in life. Pets — little 
mothers — school gardens — responsibility of older children. 

Chapter XXVIII. Crime or Sport? : 

The use of grandmothers. Persistence of the predatory 
instinct — St. Augustine and the pear tree — not a business 
proposition. Boy lawbreakers not criminals. 

Chapter XXIX. A Conflict of Ideals .... 2.''') 
Lawbreaking from the necessity of self-assertion. Boy's 
virtues not those of civilization. Launcelot and the police 
court. Moral necessity of disobedience. Why bad boys 
succeed. The alternative — it is up to us. 

B. THE MOOD OF PLAY s 

Chapter XXX. Play is Purposeful 1'"^^' 

Play seeks results. Always a whole deed — subordination -' 
to an end. Man the child of purpose. 

Chapter XXXI. Play is the Service of Ideals . . .. - 
The child's purposes not Nature's but are the most inclu- 
sive he can achieve. Play not for pleasure — involves pain. 
Subordination to conditions. Crude results at first. The 
end never attained, always an ideal of the sort that has 
ruled humanity. The unifying vision. 

Chapter XXXII. Play and Drudgery .... 2fl" 

Drudgery prescribed by hunger or by social or artistic 
conscience. Result of man's inventions. Schools should 
prepare for life regardless of agreeableness. Experience 
of drudgery useless as preparation. Only action can be 
learned. Play prepares for drudgery : by training in the 
service of ideals, by its purposef ulness, by its fighting spirit. 



XX TABLE OF CONTENTS 



PAOB 



Chapter XXXIII. Exuberant Play 280 

Letting off steam. Develops individuality — integrated 
personality. Shades into purposefid play. Music and danc- 
ing especially combine the two. 

C. GROWTH FROM WITHIN 

Chapter XXXIV. Relatedness of Play .... 289 

Big Injun not omnivorous, but selective. Significance of 
pockets. Desire to assimilate bis world as an extension of 
personality. A place for treasures. Should not be drowned 
in toys. Man a safety match — lives in the fulfillment of 
his relations. 
Chapter XXXV. The Imaginative Play of the Big 

, Injun Age 296 

The survival of make-believe. Impersonation of heroic 
sharacters. Imagination the projection of the ideal. Its im- 
portance in the Big Injun age. Stories — castles in the air. 
Th.-pter XXXVI. The Need to Dream . . . .308 
Dreaming is action in the soft — first form of growth — 
precedes planning — part of the grammar of action. Must 
wait for the vision. Action a kind of sleep. Symbols — 
music — fairy stories — myths, not useful information. Lit- 
erature the dream of man. Poetry the first form of all 
action. 

BOOK V. THE AGE OF LOYALTY 

From eleven to fourteen 

A. NATURE AND FORM OF MEMBERSHIP 

Chapter XXXVII. The Belonging Instinct . . .319 
Child and mother — ring games. Big Injun — individu- 
ality and membership — limits to sociability — hero worship 

— home membership — gregariousness. Contest develops 
the judicial and legislative faculties. The string games. 

Ch/xPter XXXVIII. The Team 335 

Self-fulfillment through membership — man the politician 

— experiencing citizenship. Belonging a special instinct. 
The team takes the individual beyond himself — teaches 
methods of loyalty — develops the belonging muscles. The 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xxi 



PAOE 



specializing in the great games brings fuller membership. 
Each member contains the team. Comparison of our na- 
tional games. The raiding games. Need of regulation. 
Chapter XXXIX. The Gang ...... 350 

The gang a true persona — expressed in team games, 
fights, raids, outings — loves darkness. Survival of the 
war band — considers outsiders enemies — treasures distinc- 
tions. Gang humor — tradition — ritual — hang-outs. 

Exuberance of the belonging instinct in college and other 
societies. " Jiners." 
Chapter XL. The Land of the Leal .... 360 

Gang the germ of all human societies. Its civilized ex- 
pression — theatricals — clubs — broadened into the school. 
Loyalty to loyalty — the land of the leal. 
Chapter XLI. The Gang Standard 369 

The gang effect on individual conduct — what the crowd 
expects. Always idealist at heart — the source of heroic 
standards — descendant of the war band — Knights of the 
Round Table. 

Manners the product of such close societies and concrete 
standards. Caste — the gentleman — the Samurai. The 
gang must be corrected, not denatured. 
Chapter XLII. The Larger Units of Membership . 380 

The neighborhood the crucible of the race — is in our 
blood — school of concrete patriotism and individual moral- 
ity — the lost unit of membership — to be cultivated by 
play and play centers. The slum a neighborhood without 
a personality. 

The trade, guild, professional organizations, trade unions. 

Town, city, county, and nation. Concreteness in patri- 
otism — when were you patriotic? Imagination — "the 
commonwealth as a huge Christian personality" — sym- 
bols, amusements, visualization — embodiment in human 
personality. The city makes the citizen. 

B. GIRLS AND LOYALTY 

Chapter XLIII. Girls 392 

Should become tomboys between eight and fourteen — 
after fourteen should be far less strenuous than boys, but 



xxii TABLE OF CONTENTS 

not give up running, romping, and ball games. Climbing, 
walking, swimming, dancing, skating. Art, music, adorn- 
ment, dramatics. Girls' loj'alty is to the home — less team 
sense than boys, but it should be developed. 
Chapter XLIV. Boys and Girls 403 

Their mutual attraction not one but many things — pur- 
suit — rivalry — maternal instinct — gregariousness — bud- 
ding power of life. Romantic love — its relation to home 
and infancy — biological importance. 

Quantitative treatment. Boys need romance — girls do 
not — merits of novel reading. 

Play of boys and girls together : should play games ; so- 
ciety should not be confined to one age. Dancing — the 
wave of rhythm. Rhythm a narcotic — its power of social 
fusion, producer of orgies. The myth of Bacchus — safety 
in development of art. 

C. THE APPRENTICE AGE. PLAY COMPENSATES 
FOR CIVILIZATION 

Chapter XLV. The Apprentice Years .... 423 

Specializing tendency at adolescence — with team desire 
to make good, leads to vocation. Moralizing power of work. 
But work should fulfill not only team sense but instinctive 
bias. 

Chapter XLVI. Dislocation of Civilized Life . . 433 
The consti'uting human instincts disappointed in indus- 
trial civilization except in the favored callings. Civiliza- 
tion has side-stepped — real life impossible to the great 
majority. Opportunity to die heroically not enough. The 
young man's revolt a moral one and in accordance with the 
general sentiment of mankind. Civilization must piake 
out a case. 

Chapter XLVII. How to Reconcile Life and Civilization 446 
Two successful systems in the past, the civic, as in Athens, 
and the chivalric. Both based on the exclusion from life 
of the majority. Both sought expression through play, one 
in dueling, hunting, and love making, the other in art and 
science. Both impossible for us, but we can learn from 
them. We must — 1. Fit the child to our world by all- 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xxiii 



PAQB 



round education and industrial training : wide application 
of the human instincts — centered on achievement — pure 
drudgery hard to find — work sustained by the belonging 
instinct. 2. Fit our world to human nature — Ruskinize, 
preserve competition, extend cooperation. 3. Provide an 
overflow. 

Chaptkr XL VIII. The Overflow 464 

Cannot preserve war or live by hunting, but can have 
game laws and football. Use of the dangerous trades in 
education. The arts as overflow — if we abolish war, must 
establish art or die. Artistic education. Function of the 
amateur, especially girls, to create a true demand. Politics 
as overflow. Short hours necessary. 

Sunday for compensation — the day of the lost talents — 
a chance to live. 

EPILOGUE. PLAY THE EESTORER 

Man the incarnation of the play instincts. They create, 
constitute, and have the power to restore. Strength through 
subordination to a purpose, especially by making good. 
Need of a market for the invalid. Minor plays for the 
sick : breathing — seeing pleasant things — making things 
— music — novels — dancing — intellectual play. Thera- 
peutic value of hunting, fighting, and nurture. Life is won 
by living 480 



PLAY m EDUCATION 

BOOK I. PLAY IS GROWTH 



CHAPTER I 

PLAY IS SERIOUS 

If you will watch a child playing, I think the first thing 
you will be struck by will be his seriousness. Whether he is 
making a mud pie, building with his blocks, playing ship or 
horse or steam engine, or marching as a soldier to defend his 
country, you will see, if you watch his face, that he is giving 
his whole mind to the matter in hand, and is as much ab- 
sorbed in it as you become in your most serious pursuits. 
Or if the dolls are sick and the children are taking their 
temperature, sending for the doctor, and administering those 
strange and awful doses which the ailments of dolls seem so 
generally to call for, you will find that these are serious 
matters, and that nothing is more offensive than to intrude 
upon such ceremonies w^th flippant or unadvised speech. 

So also with the sports of a later period. To say that 
baseball is serious is to understate the case. Football com- 
mands a devotion rarely evoked in any less strenuous pur- 
suit. What a boy lies awake about is probably not his 
spelling or arithmetic, but his chance of getting on the team. 
Anxiety on other subjects, where it exists, usually arises from 
B 1 



2 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

apprehension of what others may think or do. His deep 
and absorbing interest is in his games. 

The seriousness of play is shown in the standard of effort 
and achievement that it holds up. The strictest school- 
master of the old nose-to-the-grindstone school never secured 
the whole-hearted effort that is seen on the ball field every 
afternoon. A small boy throws a ball so as to curve in a way 
which a few years ago was thought to be impossible, another 
hits it with a round stick, while a third urchin in the distance 
runs as fast as he can and catches it. When you consider 
how little of the course of the ball the third boy saw before 
he started to run, and take into account — or better still 
experience — the other difficulties involved in the whole 
performance, you will realize that such feats, though seen 
every day on every ball field, are somewhat remarkable. At 
least things equally difficult done by boys in their arithmetic 
lessons would be considered so. 

And if he does not catch it ? A boy who is almost turning 
himself inside out in his efi'orts, but who fails in any point 
of the game, is spoken to by his companions with a severity 
which no grown person is sufficiently hard-hearted even to 
attempt. Strenuousness of effort is no palliation of his 
offense. There is no plea that "little Johnnie did his best." 
Good intentions don't go on the ball field ; the standard is 
inexorable. 

In truth the play of children is in the main not play at all 
in the sense in which grown people use the word. It is play 
in the sense of being spontaneous, agreeable, undertaken for 
its own sake and not for an ulterior object. It is not play in 
the sense of being mere relaxation or diversion, or a thing of 
secondary importance. Of course children like to play ; all 
good workmen like their work ; but it is none the less serious 
on that account. 



PLAY IS SERIOUS 3 

It is true that children do also indulge in play in the sec- 
ondary or grown-up sense — they usually distinguish it 
under the name of fooling. And such play has its function 
also, as we shall see. But the characteristic play of child- 
hood is not of this sort. 

It is the supreme seriousness of play that gives it its edu- 
cational importance. Education, as we have all learned, is 
not simply a matter of accumulating knowledge. We are 
now learning the further truth, which Froebel taught, that 
it is not even a matter of acquiring power, of training the 
muscles and the mind. We aim to develop power ; we train 
the muscles and the mind; but we are no longer content 
unless these serve as avenues to something deeper. The 
question is not of learning, nor yet of power, but of character. 
If the lesson has struck home, the result is not merely more 
knowledge or more intelligence, but more boy or girl — more 
of a person there for all purposes. If his arithmetic has 
truJ}' reached him, he will play better football ; if his football 
has been the real thing, he will do better at arithmetic. 
That is the test of a true educational experience — that it 
leaves a larger personality behind. 

An exercise to have this educational effect must possess 
the quality of complete enlistment. It is with the core of 
being, the central and pervading essence, as with the sub- 
ordinate faculties : the soul, like the muscles, grows by 
action ; it creates itself by self-assertion, by putting itself 
forth in overt deeds and into concrete form. It is only what 
you put the whole of yourself into that will give you a greater 
self in return. 

This characteristic of the true educational experience is 
possessed by play and, to the full extent, by play alone. It 
is only in his play that the child's whole power is called forth, 
that he gets himself entirely into what he does. Or rather, 



4 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

in play he puts more than himself into it, more than was 
actually there, or would ever have existed, if called for by a 
less powerful enchanter. Play is like a chemical reaction; 
in it the child's nature leaps out toward its own and takes 
possession. 



CHAPTER II 

PLAY IS GROWTH 

Play seen from the inside, as the child sees it, is the most 
serious thing in Ufe. Seen from the outside, as a natural 
phenomenon, its importance corresponds. Nature is as much 
in earnest in this matter as is the child. Her purpose as 
declared in the child's play instincts is the most serious pur- 
pose she has in his behalf. It includes, indeed, the whole 
intention with which she brought him forth, namely, to make 
a man of him. 

Play builds the child. It is a part of nature's law of 
growth. It is in truth for the sake of play, and of growth 
conducted by it, that there is such a thing as a child at all. 
As Herr Groos, our best of Germans and chief teacher in this 
matter, has well said : "Children do not play because they 
are young ; they are young in order that they may play." 
It is for the sake of play that the great phenomenon of in- 
fancy exists ; play is the positive side of that phenomenon. 
The reason the higher animals are born so helpless and un- 
formed is in order that they may be finished by this method. 
The reason man is sent into the world the most helpless of 
them all — the most absurd, impossible phenomenon in a 
world of internecine competition — is in order that he above , 
all the rest may be the playing animal, fashioned in obedience 
to the great play instincts. Play is, in sober truth, the very 
act and throe of growth. 

The working of this law of growth through play is some- 
thing with which we are all of us familiar. The law is al- 

5 



6 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

most visibly at work during every waking hour in every 
child. Indeed the difficulty in recognizing the vital function 
■ of children's play arises chiefly from the fact that the evidence 
is so familiar as to prevent our getting a fresh and realizing 
view of it. 

Growth through play is simply an example of the general 
law of growth through action. We all know that a muscle 
grows by exercise. The physiologists tell us that the same 
is true of the other tissues, — "the function makes the 
organ," as they say. The very bones depend on exercise 
for full development and are even partly shaped by the use 
we put them to, — a triumph of the old-fashioned heavy 
gymnastic school, for instance, being the conversion of the 
shoulder joint into something more or less resembling the 
hip.^ The same thing is true of habits and nervous coordina- 
tions. From learning to walk up to playing the violin skill 
comes by practice, as we all know. So also mental ability 
largely depends on training, moral power on previous right 
choices. You cannot go so deep in human nature but that 
the same law holds. Whatever may be the cause of any 
action — whatever we may think on the subject of determin- 
ism or free will — there is no doubt that it may have, through- 
out our entire being, a great effect. That children are 
peculiarly susceptible of such development is a further 
commonplace of our experience, assumed in every theory of 
education and too familiar to require illustration. 

Growth through play is an example of growth through 
action. But it is also much more than that : it is growth 
through certain prescribed activities in which an essential 
part of nature's purpose is wrapped up. The play-built 
animals are not left to grow at haphazard, are not merely 
opportunist; the action that gives their final form is not 
1 Gulick, in " Physical Education by Muscular Exercise." 



PLAY IS GROWTH 7 

such as whim or ohance may happen to direct. Nature has in 
them, as in all her creatures, specific and imperious purposes 
in view. These purposes she has embodied in certain 
impulses — in what we call the play instincts — conscious 
tendencies which unfold themselves in every child and 
direct his action so far as it is left by circumstances and his 
elders to his control. 

The difference between the play-built animals and those 
born ready-made is that, in the former, Nature has intrusted 
her leading and inclusive purposes* not to the lower nerve 
centers but to the mind, and thus left them to the creatures 
themselves to carry out. She has taken her offspring into 
partnership, whispered her secret to them in their instinc- 
tive impulses, and left to them the completion of her design. 
The playing animals are products of their own efficient will. 
Man especially is incarnate purpose. We are all in this 
most literal sense self-made. 

Play is thus the essential part of education. It is nature's 
prescribed course. School is invaluable in forming the 
child to meet actual social opportunities and conditions. 
Without the school he will not grow up to fit our institutions. 
Wilhout play he will not grow up at all. 



CHAPTER III 

PLAY TRAINS FOR LIFE 

Nature forms the child through impulses that direct his 
activity during his plastic stage. What is the nature of 
these impulses? The best teacher upon this subject I 
have ever seen was a kitten who came to stay with us one 
summer and gave a remarkable series of demonstrations. 
Anything that moved along or near the floor she made it her 
business to chase ; or if it did not move of itself she would 
set it going. A cork was her favorite plaything — I think 
because of its uncertain way of jumping and the consequent 
exigencies of its pursuit. She would crouch and lie in wait 
for it, bat it with her paw, run after it, dodge, jump into 
the air. She would set herself lessons, hitting it backwards 
under her as she reached over the rung of a straw sofa, and 
following with a combined somersault and corkscrew move- 
ment that was evidently impossible until you saw it done. 
And always the game ended with a pounce in which both 
paws came down on the cork and held it fast. 

What was that kitten doing ? Obviously she was learning 
her job. You could almost see that cork turn into a mousf 
as she pursued. She was becoming a cat by doing the thingh 
of a cat, growing into the Gray Hunter by exercising herself 
in his activities. What Nature had above all else determined 
that this creature of hers should be, that she prescribed for 
it to do while in the making. Having purposed a hunter, 
she decreed the essence of hunting as a daily and hourly 
lesson ; and the soft body, from its first helpless movement, 

8 



PLAY TRAINS FOR LIFE 9 

was molded by that exercise. She secured adaptation 
to her purpose by putting the purpose inside and letting it 
work out, that so it might pervade the whole organism, 
fitting it, like hand and glove, to its demands. And in the 
unsentimental, deadly practical school of Nature, the 
activity thus prescribed is that by which life is going to be 
supported. Her curriculum for that kitten was clearly a 
trade school. 

Equally important was the mood in which the lessons were 
carried on. It was no set of gymnastics that the kitten was 
performing. There was no ''right paw: upward raise!" 
in her instructions. The message referred not primarily 
to her legs and tail, but to the object of pursuit. And it was 
delivered not to subordinate nerve centers but to her heart. 
Her w^hole activity was radial. The purpose had first 
taken possession of her soul and was working from that 
outwards, ruling every nerve and muscle from troubled brow 
to spike of quivering tail. There was more of the hunting 
spirit in her than even her lithe body could express. What 
possessed her was the passion and ecstasy of pursuit, to which 
her physical organism conformed as best it could. A kitten 
playing is a hunting demon, a soul of fire, a spirit that 
outruns all possible expression. The cat becomes a hunter 
from the soul out because it is the hunter in her that has 
built her mind and body from the start. She is the incarna- 
tion of that single aim. 

It is the same with all the play-built animals, as Herr 
Groos has shown. All these are fashioned not merely for, but 
by, their main pursuits. Puppies chase and bite and threaten 
and roll over one another or join in the chorus after some 
common quarry, because fighting, chasing, and running with 
the pack are the vital activities of the wolf or other early 
ancestor from whom their characteristics are derived. So 



10 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

young goats climb ash barrels and woodpiles, and jump about 
in the abrupt up-and-down manner that has made them 
the unconscious humorists of the animal kingdom, because 
they are already dreaming of the mountain crags and pastures 
which their inherited qualities were made to fit. 

And so it is with man. He is, to be sure, a little more 
complicated than the cat ; his ways of making good are more 
varied, and the method of his following them is less narrowly 
prescribed. He is destined not to one kind of effectiveness 
but to many kinds. The cat is the animated conjugation 
of a single verb — "I grab, thou grabbest, oh that I might 
have grabbed." Man represents a less limited vocabulary; 
he speaks in many voices and to many ends; but his effi- 
ciency, though more varied, is none the less prescribed. 

And the method of prescription is the same. Man's 
cardinal qualities, the activities through which he is to make 
and hold a place in the world's competition, are given in 
his leading instincts; and these instincts take charge of 
him in plastic infancy and mold him to their ends. 

The process may be seen, as well as cause and effect 
in nature ever can be seen, by any one who will watch a 
child at play. There you may see Man the Maker taking 
shape before your very eyes through building blocks and the 
making of mud pies and palaces, Man the Poet born in the 
chanting and dancing games, Man the Nurturer growing 
through play with dolls and pets and plants and younger 
children, Man the Scientist evolved in plays of imitation, 
of exploring, collecting, classifying, I\Ian the Hunter de- 
veloped in the chasing games, Man the Fighter — the Her- 
cules of our nature, addressed to obstacles as sUch, whose 
joy is in the cussedness of things — wrought in the hundred 
games of contest, and Man the Citizen in the great team 
games. 



PLAY TRAINS FOR LIFE 11 

In man, as in all the higher animals, the play instincts are 
simply the instincts and interests of grown-up life, the forces 
that are to form the warp of his existence, the major effi- 
ciencies which Nature intends that he shall have. If man's 
prescribed education is broader than that of any other animal 
it is because his mature life is broader, aimed at more kinds 
of skill. Each separate instinct, also, is less narrowly fixed 
in its requirements ; there is room for judgment, discrimina- 
tion, adaptation of means to ends. As compared with that 
of his fellow-creatures man's is more of a university educa- 
tion, less of a trade school. But it is none the less practical 
on that account. 

Nature, it is true, does not teach plumbing or law or sales- 
manship, — at least not in any very direct or recognizable 
way. Her curriculum is aimed not at man's life under 
modern industrial conditions, but at life as it was during the 
long centuries in which his qualities were formed. But 
for that primitive life she gives an all-round preparation. 
Even young animals receive something more than a purely 
vocational training in the narrow sense. They learn to 
come when their mother calls, to be sufficiently polite to 
their pack or litter mates to avoid internecine brawls ; and 
kittens at least receive lessons in neatness calculated to make 
any human mother envious. So the child is trained by 
play not merely to make a living but to fulfill all the essential 
relations of a human life. It is even difficult — though 
civilization has made notable advance in that direction — to 
find any occupation wholly foreign to the aptitudes that 
Nature trains, so catholic is her provision. 

Man is the creature of his major instincts, masters of life, 
sent on before to form him in their image and to their pur- 
poses. He is creator, poet, hunter and fighter, nurturer, 
scientist, citizen — utterly and in every tissue — because he 



12 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

is formed by the instincts of creation, rhythm, nurture, 
hunting, fighting, curiosity, and social membership. The 
great constituting impulses of human nature take charge of 
his activity during his plastic stage, and he comes out 
stamped and molded in their likeness. His mind and heart 
are emanations of them ; his body is their tool, wrought and 
fitted to their use. 

It would almost seem as if the child's own use of language, 
in the importance he assigns to the verb — calling the cow 
the "moo," the dog the "bow-wow," and the sheep the 
"baa" — indicates an insight into the method by which he 
himself is made. He seems to have divined that the cat is an 
animated claw, the wolf a living pincers, as surely as a knife 
is a cutter, or an engine a puller of trains. 

And as in the kitten, so in man, there is a surplus of the 
spirit in his play. It demands of him more than he or 
any one could do. It calls upon his body to exceed itself, 
drives his powers to their limit and beyond. There is a 
transcendental element in the play instincts that suggests 
an infinite development. 



CHAPTER IV 

PLAY AND THE HUNGERS 

I HAVE enumerated what I believe to be the principal 
play instincts, seven in all — creation, rhythm, hunting, 
fighting, nurture, curiosity, team play. Most people I tliink 
would include all of these ; some would include others that 
I have omitted. 

Acquisitiveness, for instance, is often regarded as a special 
instinct. To me it seems rather a manifestation of several 
instincts which require material things — blocks, tools, 
dolls, miscellaneous objects — for the building, controlling, 
nurturing, classifying activities that they prescribe. The 
cases of the miser ind of the "grabby" child seem to me 
to represent the hypertrophy of these instincts in their 
preliminary stage — an excess of zeal in acquiring the means 
necessary to their satisfaction — rather than a special instinct 
to horde or grab. 

Self-adornment, which I have not included, does seem to 
be a special instinct. I have omitted it from my list because 
— except as an occasional ally, in little girls, of their parents' 
baneful efforts to make them keep their clothes clean — it 
is not particularly important until the period of adolescence, 
when it appears in the mutual relation of boys and girls, 
which I shall speak of in describing that age. 

Climbing is evidently an instinct, and it is important in 
its day, but it is not one of the continuing impulses upon 
which the child's whole life is woven. The same may be 

i 



\ 



14 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

said of the impersonating impulse, at least in its most salient 
form, importunate as that is during its special period. 

There is also a whole set of instincts that I have not 
included in my list. I mean those that are supplementary 
to the major instincts, such as the instincts of striking with a 
stick or weapon, throwing at a mark, wrestling, which are 
clearly ancillary to the hunting and fighting instincts. In 
this class should perhaps be included the more rudimentary 
impulses like grasping, wielding, walking, making vocal 
sounds. There are many such, some of which will be men- 
tioned in their place, but they are not among the main in- 
clusive motives, and their enumeration here would be a dis- 
traction rather than a help in understanding our subject as 
a whole. 

There is, besides, one other very important class of instincts 
that I have not mentioned, and which I shall " have much 
to say about as they have no direct part in children's play. 
I mean the hungers : for air, food, and the sexual relation. 
The hunting creatures must still go forth in search of food 
even when the hunting instinct left to itself would ^ive way 
to sickness and fatigue. Hunger drives them. Their 
motive is no longer wholly an instinct toward a special sort 
of action, but partly the avoidance of pain. So men are 
driven to their tasks by the .hunger motive. To all her 
other, more inspiring, commands Nature has added for all 
her creatures this all-inclusive blanket clause — "Succeed or 
starve." Behind every living creature since life first appeared 
upon this planet, including our own long line of ancestors, 
this motive or its dim equivalent has stood as a taskmaster 
exacting strenuous and successful exertion on pain of death. 

Many men — probably the great majority — cannot do 
their best work without this stimulus or the fear of it. We 
are set to this pressure and for the most part require its 



/ 



PLAY AND THE HUNGERS 15 

presence for our full discharge. A lazy, happy-go-lucky 
generation, accustomed to hearing the wolf at the door or to 
seeing him in wait for us just around the corner — not easily 
made anxious, or we should have died off long ago — we 
need his help to bring out our resources. Even genius waits 
upon the hunger motive, as witness Thackeray, Goldsmith, 
and many other scribes. The starved artist is often an 
artist partly because starvation was happily presented to 
him as the alternative. 

We are thus partly products of the hungers, not indeed as 
to the form of our exertion, but as to the full power of making 
it, — children not only of a certain class of specific tendencies, 
but also of the physical necessity of self-support. 

Let us not, however, take the whip for the horse, mistake 
the penalty upon idleness, useful though it be as a stimulus, 
for the powe; :^,act. A good many people had been hungry 
before " Vanity Fair " was written. The whole animal king- 
dom, bar one, might have starved to death without producing 
"A Man's a Man for a' that." Given the element of genius, 
the fall of an apple, the light striking on a pewter mug, may 
produce a wonderful result ; but let us not bestow our worship 
on the mug or the apple on that account. 

The hungers stand midway between the reflexes and the 
play instincts. They seem to be both too simple to require 
development through play, and in the case of the hungers 
for air and food too necessary to life to wait for it. They 
might apparently have been made purely reflex except for 
the advantages of inhibition. In the case of breathing, con- 
scious action is as a rule not in the exercise of the function 
but in suspending it, and is of advantage only under such ex- 
ceptional circumstances as choking or swimming under water. 

There is thus, as it were, an aristocracy of instincts. On 
the one hand are the hungers, of a very simple nature, not 



16 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

capable of development, susceptible of a material satisfaction, 
possessed by man in common with much lower forms of life. 
A primitive, earth-born race, their worship is the ancient wor- 
ship of Demeter, the Earth Mother, giver of increase, and 
of Astarte, goddess of reproduction. Their decrees are en- 
forced by physical penalties ; their satisfaction, as Plato — 
perhaps too puritanically — pointed out, is not so much a 
positive gratification as an escape from pain. 

On the other side stand the great achieving instincts which 
direct the child's growth through play, with their subordi- 
nates drawn up like non-commissioned officers in their train. 
These demand not a physical satisfaction, but the active serv- 
ice of an end. Their accent is not on what is to be got, but 
on what is to be done. They make the motive of the deed 
the doing of it : are enforced not, directly at least, by penal- 
ties, but by their own sheer authority. Their service does not 
pall through gratification ; on the contrary, their power in- 
creases with our obedience. Their demand is not limited to 
a particular satisfaction, but is infinite and insatiable. 

These are the outputting instincts, prescribing the form 
of man's effectiveness — the inclusive instincts, through 
which his whole nature gets expressed, avenues of his total 
discharge. The hungers, of course, are also active impulses : 
a passive instinct would be a contradiction. But the grati- 
fication they afford is largely passive — an assuagement, 
the quenching of a thirst. In the case of the play instincts, on 
the other hand, the gratification is in the doing and in the 
beauty of the thing accomplished. 

It is with these latter also, rather than with the hungers, 
that we identify ourselves. When the creative instinct 
triumphs over hunger, the man feels that he himself has 
won. When fear or desire conquer the team sense of loyalty, 
he knows that he has lost. The one set of impulses form an 



PLAY AND THE HUNGERS 17 

inner circle, if not our very self, yet close to it ; the others are 
comparatively alien, are sometimes even felt as enemies to be 
kept at bay. It is true the play instincts also are sometimes 
felt to be the voice of something outside ourselves. But it is 
the voice of something higher, to which we owe allegiance. 

The distinction holds for all the playing animals. The 
cat eats, breathes, reproduces her kind, in order that she 
and they may hunt. It is to that end that her blood cir- 
culates and her heart beats. Hunting is the sum total of her, 
including and explaining all the rest. 

There is indeed an obvious sense in which the opposite 
is true, in which a hunting animal does not eat that he may 
hunt, but hunts in order that he may eat. Biologically 
speaking such is undoubtedly the more illuminating view ; the 
lower instincts are the elder and, if not the parents, at least 
the taskmasters and beneficiaries, of the higher sort. iVpollo 
was servant to Admetus. Each of the achieving instincts 
ministers to one or another of the more ancient and rudi- 
mentary. Hunting and the fashioning of tools and weapons 
serve the food hunger; upon the hunger of sex wait the 
instincts of single combat, — unpleasantly illuminated by 
the eye teeth of the human male — of song and of adornment. 
The nurturing instinct sprang, not indeed from sex, but 
from the correlative race-perpetuating instinct of love of 
offspring. Curiosity has become an abiding trait in the most 
successful creatures doubtless because of the material ad- 
vantage it confers. Even rhythm must have been an aid 
to survival both through the greater, endurance of drudgery 
and the closer social fusion which it favors. Membership 
itself, the source of loyalty and of the social virtues, repre- 
sents the superiority of the group over the individual in 
the eternal struggle to survive. 

And the lower still drive the higher instincts when driving 



18 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

is necessary to their ends. Nature, as we have said, besides 
prescribing the specific forms of his effectiveness, gives to each 
creature this implacable, slave-driving motive to succeed. 

But even so, insistent as the hungers are, the gods and not 
the giants have the last word. As. we shall see more clearly 
in a later chapter, the achieving instincts are the more 
authoritative. 

Finally, behind the main achieving instincts, there loom 
the outlines of larger, more inclusive ones. There seems to 
be an undifferentiated instinct to get busy, the "joy in 
being a cause" of some child students, illustrated in many 
little pointless tricks and habits, like swinging a cane or 
reading advertisements, and by countless exploits of the 
monkey or small boy variety. People speak of the instinct 
of self-preservation, and there seems to be such, in the 
ethical as well as in the physical sense. Every man, when 
he becomes conscious, desires instinctively not merely to 
stay alive, but to possess a life, to organize and unify existence, 
to get himself in harmony with the universe and it with him. 
The impulse of self-assertion, characteristic, as we shall see, 
of a whole period of growth, is a marked instance of the 
effect of this instinct in play and in the child's whole attitude 
toward life. Kant's Pure Reason is something of this nature 
and, as William James pointed out, is instinct in the wider 
sense ; it is not reasoning, but a final authoritative intuition 
of what is what in conduct, inseparably combined with a 
categorical imperative to pursue the best. 

Thus there are, within the class of the achieving instincts 
themselves, instincts both before and after the great directing 
ones, both nearer and farther than the spiritual focus. 
Play is, in the main, the service of those that occupy the 
central place, that remain in focus and prescribe the leading 
interests of life. 



CHAPTER V 

PLACE AND LIMITATIONS OF GROWTH THROUGH PLAY 

Play is a part of the law of growth. It is not the whole 
of it ; nature's specifications for her playing creatures are not 
all contained in the play instincts. And growth itself is not, 
of course, all powerful : much is already settled at the 
start. 

In the first place there are physical limitations. There 
is given at the time of birth a wonderful and complex organ- 
ism such as it has taken thousands of centuries to evolve — 
not a formless lump of tissue, but a miracle of the organization 
of matter to serve the purposes of mind. There is given a 
skeleton and a physical structure of a certain form, capable 
of only limited variation. All subsequent action and ex- 
perience must build on this and can develop the creature thus 
presented only within certain limits, wide but inexorably 
fixed. No man can add a cubit to his stature by taking 
thought. A tiger's play instincts inserted in a child's body 
could never quite make a tiger of him, though they might 
go far in that direction. Every athlete knows that there is 
for him a physical limit which he can indefinitely approach 
but cannot pass. He can fail of the attainment of this limit ; 
and he can modify his actual form within the boundaries 
thus set down by developing one part and neglecting another 
— as a man can write letters on a lawn by watering part and 
leaving the rest in drought. Or he can by constant straining 
induce more or less deformity. But he cannot jump out 

19 



20 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of his skin nor project his body beyond the lines laid down 
for it. 

And not only is the possible variation limited but there 
is a bias toward a certain form. There is, as it were, an ideal 
body waiting for each one of us, wrapped up in our vital 
principle, which we tend to live up into in proportion to the 
fullness of our physical life. Education seems only to confirm 
us in this destiny. The development of James yields simply 
more James. Exercising John makes him more Johnlike 
than ever. The case is a little like that of the foolscap paper 
we used to have at school, stamped with a raised representa- 
tion of the Capitol at Washington which was barely visible 
when the paper was clean, but could be brought out in 
full detail by rubbing it over with a pencil. 

Besides what is given in the bodily structure and in its 
fixed bias toward a particular form, much is also predeter- 
mined in the reflexes controlled by the nerve centers below 
the jurisdiction of the will. The function may in these 
cases make the organ, but the function itself is not intrusted 
to the mind. No man can directly modify the beating of his 
heart nor interfere in the mysteries of the digestive (or 
indigestive) process. Whether the potential body resides 
in these reflexes or in the organs themselves — or whether, 
as I suppose is more nearly the truth, law and substance, 
function and organ, are correlative expressions of a single 
process — in either case this part of the law of growth is out- 
side the direct influence of the mind and of the play instincts 
that act through it. 

Analogous to the wholly involuntary reflexes are those 
instincts — that is to say actions prescribed, partly at 
least, to the mind, and not wholly to the lower nerve centers 
— whose operation is so simple as to require little or no prac- 
tice, and which are not developed through play because not 



LIMITATIONS 21 

needing such development. These are the hungers, already 
spoken of, which have apparently been placed under the 
jurisdiction of the mind, not to obtain its direction as to 
method, but in order that it may have power of inhibition 
or release — may say when but not hoiv. Play has no direct 
part in the development of the jaws by eating or of the lungs 
by breathing, although, by inducing a healthy appetite for 
air and food, its indirect effects are of the greatest conse- 
quence. Whistling and chewing gum might perhaps be 
cited as direct play of the masticating and respiratory ap- 
paratus. 

What is left, then, to the play instincts? Just what part 
do they actually have in the child's growth ? 

In the first place there is the power of release. The ideal 
body may be predetermined ; it may be waiting for the child, 
although invisible, as the oak is waiting in the acorn ; but 
there is still the momentous issue of its realization. What 
if it remains unborn ? The growth of every child is the story 
of the Sleeping Beauty, in which play takes the part of 
the Prince. A potential body exists, but its actuality waits 
upon its use, and its use is prescribed in the play instincts. 
These are commissioned by Nature to touch off the train and 
reveal the structure she has planned. 

The physical limitation upon the effects of play in growth 
is a limitation of amount and not of kind. It is not, as it 
were, a hostile limitation ; the body and the instincts corre- 
spond ; they are, like the tissues and the reflexes, correlative — 
two sides of the same fact, aspects of a single vital process. 
They represent the well-known partners in all physical 
phenomena, force and substance, and are related as falling 
is related to the stone. The hunting instinct is limited by 
the kitten's body only in that it is not the body of a tiger, 
or of some super-tiger of infinite prehensile power. But it 



22 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

is also most wonderfully served by it. This is the sort of 
body it would have chosen — has chosen, indeed, among a 
million. It is the body which it has built up, or at least 
selected for itself, through all the centuries. The human 
body is almost equally adapted to the human instincts. 
Play in developing the child makes visible its own ideal, 
clothes itself in fitting actuality. 

As we recede from the physical side of growth the dominion 
of the play instincts is wider and more obvious. KCheir 
effect is greater on the muscles than on the bones, on the 
nerves than on the muscles, and greatest in the building 
up of habits and acquired reflexes. For not all the reflexes 
are ready-made. Those that are necessary to carry on or to 
transmit physical life are given at the start, or make their 
appearance automatically later on. Those, on the other 
hand, that serve the higher impulses, that constitute the 
creature's special skill and make for him his place in 
the world of competition, are, in man and in the higher 
animal/, acquired after birth. And they are acquired 
through the means of play. 

It is a fact of cardinal importance that in the production of 
habits and acquired reflexes play has not merely a releasing, 
but a selective power. It is true, their general direction 
is prescribed, and that not merely by the nature of the play 
instincts themselves, but also by a corresponding bias of 
the whole nervous mechanism. It is not every kind of 
action that establishes a habit or secretes a reflex. Throwing 
with the right arm is readily acquired ; for most men the 
power is less easily developed in the left. Acts that are dis- 
tasteful, meaningless for us, can be repeated a thousand times 
and leave no trace, as witness the regular life of sailors on 
board ship, or the familiar case of boys who have been made 
to keep their clothes clean or wash their hands. Our very 



LIMITATIONS 23 

arms and legs have prejudices of their own. As Bob Acres 
says: "Damme, my feet don't like being called paws," and 
they recalcitrate when bid to act as such. Action in the 
general direction of our major instincts, on the other hand, 
is sjTnpathetic to the whole organism. The lower nerve 
centers are quickly interested : the game seems not wholly 
unfamiliar to them, and they respond in a reminiscent sort of 
way. The great play instincts and the body made to serve 
them are, as we have said, correlative, related not as clay 
to the sculptor, but rather as partners in a common enter- 
prise — although one partner is the leader and has the power 
of initiative. 

The general direction of the reflexes that shall be developed 
through play is thus prescribed, both in the nature of play 
itself and in the especial susceptibility of the organism to its 
purposes. But there is within the scope of these master 
instincts an almost infinite choice as to method : the building, 
fighting, creative instincts, and the rest, have each a great 
variety of issues. And the adaptive power of the subordinate 
centers corresponds. A man may hunt with a spear, a gun, 
a bow and arrow, or a hook and line, or he may be a fisher 
after men. So he may build huts or houses, temples, poems, 
laws, hypotheses ; the creative impulse gets itself recorded 
with equal readiness in music, mausoleums, and mud pies. 
Competition, again, takes on an infinite variety of forms 
both in play and in grown-up life. We compete in sport 
and politics, in business, in art, religion, social intercourse, 
in civic architecture and women's dress. And according 
to the particular methods in which each instinct gets ex- 
pressed, especially during childhood, are particular reflexes 
established and special skill acquired. 

The truth is — and it is the most important truth in the 
whole matter of the constitution of the higher, play-built 



24 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

animals — that nature's decree as given in the play instincts 
is never in completed form. There is always a gap between 
the terms of the order given and the method of its execution. 
Lincoln said that legs were the right length if they were 
long enough to reach the ground, but nature's great forming 
instincts, as set to work in the growing child, never quite 
reach the plane of action — never tell him precisely what to 
do. The orders they contain are brief and general : "Hunt," 
"Build," "Nurture," "Find out," "Belong," "Compete." 
A few supplementary directions are indeed added as to how 
these orders are to be carried out — as in the striking and 
throwing, walking, grasping impulses. But these supple- 
mentary instincts are themselves of a rather general nature 
and never furnish a complete or exclusive code. Nor are 
there established reflexes sufficient to mark out the exact 
path of the discharge. It is here that the great function of 
play comes in. Its business is to fill in the gap thus left 
between these general orders and their execution with habits 
and acquired reflexes, to develop skill — precipitate each of 
the master instincts, within the limits of its general scope, 
upon some form of specialized efficiency. Through daily 
practice in specific methods, play brings each of the great 
human impulses down to earth and makes it applicable along 
special lines. 

Even in comparatively simple matters, the same rule holds. 
When it is time for the baby to use his legs, Nature speaks 
not to the muscles but to the child. She whispers "Kick," 
and leaves him to find out how; and no two children do 
even their kicking just alike. So when it is time to walk. 
Nature says merely "Walk," — at first not even that, but 
only " Locomote " — and leaves the whole transit problem 
on his hands; or perhaps I should say on his hands and 
knees. 



LIMITATIONS 25 

Play thus creates in man and in the higher animals what 
we call a second nature, supplementary to the first and essen- 
tial to its practical efficiency. Without the acquirement of 
this second nature the play creature would remain forever 
vague, unfinished, inapplicable to the real affairs of life. 
The gap between impulse and execution would remain un- 
filled. A play-inheriting animal that does not play will be 
one whose nature does not reach, a creature on a grand design 
whose development has been arrested, able to dream of great 
things but less able to execute than the rudimentary natures 
whose simpler plan has been fully carried out. If Nature 
says " Play, " you must play or never quite be born. 

The function of play in growth is, then, to realize the 
potential body, and to supplement the impulses which 
the major instincts give in general terms by habits and 
reflexes, making them efficient to specific ends. 



CHAPTER VI 

ADVANTAGES OF BEING A PLAY-BUILT ANIMAL 

It is to the more general nature of his master instincts — 
not in his case the hungers, but the instincts that have charge 
of his effective life — and to the wider gap thus left between 
these instincts and their discharge that man's superiority 
to the other animals is due. In the lowest forms of life 
there is no such gap at all. There is, indeed, no mind by 
which what we call an instinct could be felt or a purpose 
entertained. The impulses which govern action prescribe 
its exact form, with no margin left for variation ; in these 
the appropriate stimulus pulls the trigger, as it were, and 
the movement follows with a fatal precision and uniformity. 
Theirs is the psychology of the steel trap — " dead open 
and shut" — like the way our own eyes wink without our 
help when anything comes too near them. 

When we reach the level at which action is not always 
precipitated by a mere sensual stimulus, but is sometimes 
directed toward an object perceived by the animal as exist- 
ing outside himself — so that the problem of adjusting move- 
ment to the reaching or avoidance of such object is intro- 
duced — the gap between instinct and execution begins 
to show itself. A toad may have a very simple-hearted 
and unequivocal instinct to jump at flies, subject to few 
inhibitions; there may be very little of the Hamlet about 
him on the particular question of to jump or not to jump. 
But nevertheless the instinct to " jump-at-flies", which I 
suppose is about the form of the decree, is no longer a simple, 

26 



ADVANTAGES 27 

perfectly specific impulse. It has within itself an unfinished 
and contingent element. The toad must at least, in each 
particular case, turn himself in the right direction and judge 
his distance. The command contains the implied supple- 
mentary clause " in such direction and at such .ange as 
the special circumstances may require." The instinct does 
not itself reach to the actual fly, and the gap thus left must 
be filled in by a special adjustment in each case. 

A human parallel to this degree of generality of instinct, 
though by no means an exact one, is in the impulse of the 
small boy to throw things at a cat. The instinctive com- 
mand " throw something at her" is given without qualifica- 
tion and received without misgiving, but the command does 
not give the range or the direction in a specific case. These 
necessary determinations must be made, and action adapted 
to them, by some supplementary mechanism. 

The higher we rise in the scale of animal life, the wider 
this gap becomes between a given impulse and its execution. 
The hunting instinct in the higher carnivora, for instance, 
is very general in its nature, leaving the creature in each 
particular case a vast and difficult problem as to its execu- 
tion. There are, it is true, certain subordinate instincts — 
of lying in wait, pursuing, seizing — ready, like well-trained 
subalterns, to fill in at special points in the execution of the 
decree. But these subordinate, more executive instincts 
have not only to be selected and applied, each at the appro- 
priate moment, by some controlling principle, but they are 
themselves partly indefinite and leave, in each particular 
application, a vast space to be filled in by special adapta- 
tions — as in the choice of position, avoiding obstacles, 
taking short cuts, heading oflF the game. I knew of a fox 
who scraped out for himself a hiding place on the top of 
a bunker on a golf course so that he could lie in wait there 



28 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

and spring out on the crows who used to promenade In the 
close vicinity. It is a long way from even his set of hunting 
impulses to such an application of them. And in the con- 
verse case, where one of these creatures is not hunting but 
being hunted, there is abundant evidence from hunters 
and trappers of the extraordinary sagacity they show in 
solving the stratagems used against them and avoiding their 
effects. Every such expedient carries out an instinct, 
but it is also in addition to it : the instinct does not carry 
out itself. 

The various commands, " shut, " " seize," " hunt," — 
implanted respectively in the jellyfish, the toad, and the 
fox, — represent three widely separated degrees of generality, 
and the creatures that severally respond to them are corre- 
spondingly separated in the degree of their adaptability, 
and of the intelligence by which the necessary adaptations 
are supplied. 

In the human instincts by far the highest degree of gen- 
erality is reached. Man's peculiarity in this respect is 
apparently due to the human hand and to the far greater 
variety in the expression of his instincts made possible to 
him by the possession of this most adaptable of members. 
The hand is not only in itself the finest and most wonderful 
of tools, but, through its powers of shaping and wielding 
other instruments, it bestows the freedom of the whole 
world of mechanics, opening up practical opportunities in 
a geometric ratio and making the world, to its possessor, 
a different place from what it is to any other creature. While 
the other hunting animals, for instance, are limited in final 
execution, and therefore in every method leading up to it, 
to the use of mouth or claw, man hunts with bow or sling 
or trap or gun, with net or spear or hook; calls in to his 
assistance the dog, the horse, the falcon ; makes boats, even 



ADVANTAGES 29 

plants forests and digs out ponds, to help him. And all 
this he does as hunter alone, to say nothing of the wonderful 
variety of choice opened out to him between hunting and 
his many other ways of getting on. In him the angle of 
variation in the discharge of his innate impulses has widened 
from a few degrees to a whole circle. Indeed man's methods 
of execution have finally exceeded their original charter 
and found — for better and for worse — methods of attain- 
ing material ends that are outside the scope of his achieving 
instincts. 

In the case of man the gap between instinct and execu- 
tion is thus by far the widest, and the need of some way of 
filling it is correspondingly great. It is, as I have said, in 
the filling of this gap that play takes its important part in 
growth. It is indeed because of this gap that there is such 
a thing as play — or rather it is for the sake of play, and of 
the adaptations it can bring about, that such a gap exists. 
The superiority of the play-built animals, and of man espe- 
cially, is largely the result of these adaptations and of the 
mechanism of adaptation which they have necessitated. 

At first sight, indeed, the superiority might seem to be 
upon the other side. The play-built animal has, not only 
in his prolonged period of helplessness, but even in his final 
make-up, some obvious disadvantages. He is always in 
a sense an amateur as compared with his more clear-cut 
rivals. The ready-made animals are the true specialists. 
They are practical folks, not troubled by theory nor given 
to hesitation, enjoying a perfect freedom from the inhibitions 
that distract the more complicated products of the play 
method. Each of them knows only one thing, but he knows 
that one thing well. The snapping turtle asks no questions, 
has no discursive curiosity, but acts at once and with pre- 
cision as occasion calls. Such a creature will often possess, 



30 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

almost from birth, a higher degree of skill in his own specialty 
than his play-built rival can ever acquire. \Vlien opening 
and shutting are what the situation calls for, the "dead-open- 
and-shut" psychology has an advantage with which no other 
mechanism can compete. While the play-built theorist 
is pondering the situation his more simple rival gets the 
thing done. 

Man, as the most play-built of all the animals, most 
general in his native impulses, is the most amateurish and 
almost the clumsiest of all. He can do everything a little, 
but, by the specialist's standard, nothing well. The horse, 
and a hundred others, can beat him at running, the fisli 
at swimming, the squirrel at climbing, the wolf at biting — 
and so on. He is not quick at anything — up to a really 
competitive degree — unless at some action like winking, 
in which he is still on the level of the ready-made. His 
attempts at speed are, from the hunting creatures' point 
of view, merely ludicrous. Man can never hope to possess 
the advantages of specialization as many of his rivals do. 

To make up for these immense advantages of the ready- 
made, the play-built animal has two compensations: he 
is finished to fit actual conditions, and he can discriminate. 

By the former advantage I mean that the gap between 
the instincts and their execution is filled, not merely by 
special adaptation of his actions in each specific case, but 
by permanent adaptations of habit and structure which 
become a part of the creature's bodily and nervous consti- 
tution. A second nature is acquired to supplement the first. 
The play-built animal starts with an imperfect outfit of 
established reflexes, but with the power to acquire new ones 
applicable to the conditions which he finds. The ready- 
made creature must survive or perish according to whether 
the world he encounters exactly fits the set of aptitudes 



ADVANTAGES 31 

he brings. He has no power of adaptation. He is the true 
conservative, the genuine and consistent Tory of the animal 
kingdom, who must, by his very construction both of body 
and mind, hve by the plan that worked well for his ancestors, 
or die. The play-built creature, on the other hand, is partly 
made to order. He is sent into the world merely roughed 
out, to the end that he may be finished to suit the market. 
His skill may never be so perfect as that of the aboriginally 
specialized ; he will always be a little hesitating and a little 
slow. But what he can do will be more nearly what the 
actual circumstances require. 

INIan especially, though he can never rival the born 
specialists in their several lines, has a vastly greater range 
of skill to choose from ; and, through the instinctive practice 
of play during its plastic period, his uncommitted nervous 
system comes to embody his chosen method. He can adapt 
not only his actions but, as we say, " adapt himself" to circum- 
stances — drilling his own body and nerve centers into a 
special instrument for the sort of hunting, fighting, building, 
called for by his actual surroundings. 

The other great advantage of the play method of growth 
is that the gap left, according to that method, between 
instinct and action has constituted an unconditional demand 
for mind. To be driven on to action by insistent instincts, 
and yet to be left every day, as to very many actions, to 
work out the specific method of their execution under the 
infinitely varying conditions of actual life, is to be placed 
in the position familiarly known as up against it, — a posi- 
tion in which you must use your mind if you have any, and 
evolve one immediately if you have not. Such necessity 
has been, in most literal sense, the mother not only of inven- 
tion but of the special organ that invents — or that releases 
the inventive faculty. The demand for adaptation calls 



32 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

imperatively for an adapting plant, a central office to which 
the instant daily problems may be referred ; and the answer 
to the demand has been the human mind. The gap in man 
and the higher animals between instinct and action has been 
filled in by their superior intelligence as the gap between 
ground and fruit is spanned by the neck of the giraffe. 
So absolute is this connection between the demand and the 
supply that the two kinds of development — progressive 
indefiniteness of instinct and increasing brain power — 
must always have gone hand in hand. 

To enlarge on the positive advantages of mind over no 
mind is perhaps unnecessary. But there is one negative 
advantage that is worth remembering. The mind of the 
play-built creature not only adapts action to circumstances 
in each particular case and, during infancy, builds up the 
reflexes to fit actual conditions, but it also retains a super- 
visory control over the reflexes it has itself established. 
Having been there at "the biggin o't" — having indeed 
been itself the drillmaster — it knows each reflex from the 
ground up, and like Napoleon, "the little corporal," can 
at any time take the musket from the private soldier and 
instruct him in the manual of arms. If the subordinate 
nerve centers go wrong, or if for any reason it becomes de- 
sirable to alter or suspend their operation, the mind can 
interpose a veto or take command. 

The ready-made animal responds to appropriate stimulus 
with the swiftness and accuracy, but also with the fatality, 
of a chemical reaction. Darwin tells of a pike who was 
placed in an aquarium separated by a glass partition from 
some small fish, his natural prey. As soon as he saw the 
fish he darted at them and of course came into collision 
with the glass. He repeated this performance, at intervals, 
for about three mo^iths, often striking with such force as 



ADVANTAGES 33 

to stun himself. Contrast an experiment with a more 
theorizing creature. A monkey was given some eggs wrapped 
up in pieces of paper. Then, after he got accustomed to 
opening the paper and eating the eggs, he was given a wasp 
similarly wrapped up, who when the paper was opened 
promptly flew out and stung him. For the monkey that 
single experiment was enough ; he did not get caught a 
second time. But neither did he rush to the conclusion 
that all things wrapped up in paper are dangerous; he 
simply held each piece up to his ear and gave it a 
shake before he opened it, and so continued success- 
fully to extract the eggs without again encountering the 
wasp. 

Or take the familiar human instance of the suburbanite 
going to the train. His legs carry him to the station a hun- 
dred mornings, not only doing the walking but turning out 
from obstacles with very little assistance from the mind. 
But on the hundred and first occasion, when a horse suddenly 
has hysteria upon the sidewalk, or an automobile begins 
a set of novel evolutions in the street where he has to cross, 
his mind instantly resumes control, and he has stopped, 
jumped, and perhaps even hazarded an opinion as to the 
mental capacity of the driver, in nearly as short a time as 
his legs would have required to take a single step. 

The self-taught operations of the playing animal are 
still shot through with mind, which wanders like a search- 
light over the whole field of action, passing from the most 
minute direction of detail to a sublime obliviousness even 
of highly complicated combinations. Presence of mind and 
absent-mindedness mark the varying moods of this great ad- 
ministrator, who has made this unskillful body of ours go so 
far in competition with its more expert rivals. The guinea 
pig in a famous experiment was much quicker at the start ; 



34 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

he knew it all much sooner than the rat. But the rat, from 
not knowing it all so soon, found that there was a much 
greater "all" to know than was ever revealed to any guinea 

pig- 
So that, within the gap left between impulse and execution 
by the general nature of the play instincts, nature has built 
two notable kinds of structure : first, adaptation of the 
organism to actual conditions ; and second, the mind itself, 
under whose direction the adaptations are made, which 
keeps a supervisory control of all, and strikes out new 
and special combinations as emergency requires. 



CHAPTER VII 

PLAY AND TEACHING 

There is one especial kind of adaptation exemplified in 
the play-built creatures and by man especially, not men- 
tioned in the foregoing chapter, which is nevertheless of 
vital importance. I mean social adaptation, the building 
into the individual, in the form of habits and acquired 
reflexes, not merely of special aptitudes to meet existing 
physical conditions, but of forms of skill found by previous 
generations to be advantageous. 

]\Ian learns not merely from his physical environment 
but from social intercourse, especially that of children with 
their elders. He is the pupil creature. If experience is 
the only school that fools will learn at, he surely is not al- 
together a fool. He learns very largely from example, 
takes advantage during infancy of his soft and uncommitted 
nature to form himself upon the experience of his own racial 
past. He thus secures a cumulative inheritance — each 
generation, as in a coral reef, building upon those that have 
gone before. 

Man thus selects his future self in the light of the tradi- 
tions of his race. By the time he is grown up he is, not by 
intention alone but by acquired bent, a citizen, a member of 
the family — a hunter, fighter, musician, artist, lawyer, 
mechanic — according to existing custom and the knowledge 
of his time and people. His social, like his physical, inherit- 
ance has been salted away in his spinal marrow and is now 
a part of him. He is in his habits, reflexes, and very physi- 

35 



36 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

cal structure the heir to all that his past generations have 
discovered. 

This acquirement of socially developed adaptations has 
not been left to chance. There is in every child a special 
instinct, that of imitation, to insure his copying at least 
the more usual and more striking occupations of his elders 
and so acquiring those forms of skill in which their special 
efficiency consists. The Indian boy practices incessantly 
with bow and arrow. Among civilized people the parental 
occupation is apt to be less fascinating and in most cases 
less visible to the child. But whenever by good luck his 
father does do a few chores at home, the boy follows him 
about and wants to imitate him. He would follow him to 
war or to the hunt, to field or stable or workshop, and would 
learn with joy from him how to make arrows or boats, how 
to milk the cow or shingle the barn, if he but had the chance. 
"Helping mother" is the small child's favorite, as well as 
his most troublesome, pursuit. 

The natural surroundings of a growing child include the 
occupations of grown-up life. The home was the original 
workshop. The segregation of industry, removing from 
the child his natural copy, is a modern and, educationally 
considered, a disastrous innovation. 

And the instinct of imitation applies not merely in the 
home. Small boys instinctively worship bigger boys, re- 
ceiving instruction from them — even when imparted in 
wonderfully unsympathetic ways — with a docility that is 
a marvel to their long-suffering parents. They seem posi- 
tively to court abuse from these fierce pedagogues of their 
instinctive choice. As they grow older the college athlete 
or the great baseball player becomes their god, whose manner, 
walk, and speech they imitate and whose exploits form their 
ideal of heroism. 



PLAY AND TEACHING 37 

Besides the instinct of imitation, the belonging instinct 
affords a powerful motive of acquisition. The child longs 
to make good as a member both of the home and of the team, 
and religiously exercises himself in the means of doing so. 

Conversely, to meet the learning instincts of the child, 
there is a teaching instinct on the other side. The mother 
cat wiggles her tail to set her children running after it, and 
it is said that kittens so coached are as advanced in five 
days as uneducated kittens are in eight. There you have 
the beginning of the school. Mother birds give lessons 
in flying ; all birds that are at all musical take singing les- 
sons. Scientists have even maintained that young otters 
are taught to swim.^ Among humans mother and child 
are instinctively teacher and pupil, as anyone can see, al- 
though the teaching is not all on one side. Every parent, 
every bigger boy or girl, indeed every man or woman, desires 
to instruct. Mother, father, big boy, older sister, teacher, 
prophet, writer, are all examples of this instinct. 

Out of these complementary instincts, of the child to 
learn and of his elders to instruct, have grown all the indus- 
tries and all the arts. Reading, writing, language itself, 
are among the products of this combination, though the last 
named seems also to have a special instinct of its own. 

Learning from their elders is as natural to children as 
chasing, wrestling, or playing doll. To cut them off from 
the opportunity to learn, whether in the home, in the school, 
or on the playground, would be to deprive them not only 
of a necessary part of education but of an essential element 
in play. The lonely, untaught cliild is a crudely artificial 
product. To leave a child alone in order that he may have 
a full chance to be himself is like giving a fish real liberty 

' George E . Johnson — ' ' Why Teach a Child to Play ? " Printed 
by Playground Association of America, 1 Madison Ave., N.Y. 



38 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

by taking him from the obstructing medium of the water. 
Social inheritance through teaching is as definitely provided 
for in instinctive play as is physical inheritance through 
bodily structure and the fixed reflexes. 

Teaching is thus a necessary part of play because the 
play instincts themselves call for it. But teaching enhances 
play for another reason also — namely, because play, like 
all other human pursuits, is itself a social as well as a physical 
inheritance, handed down partly by tradition, not wholly 
evolved by each generation for itself. Children do not 
inherit baseball any more than they inherit the Lord's 
Prayer, as George E. Johnson truly says. They inherit 
tag in rudimentary form, just as puppies do, but they do 
not inherit cross tag, hill dill, or prisoners' base. The play 
instincts are a constant factor in every generation, but their 
satisfaction is partly a matter of discovery. The best 
games are gradually evolved, and handed on from one genera- 
tion to another. s^A good game is a w^ork of genius, a happy 
interpretation of the inherited spiritual nature of mankind. 
Of our whole social inheritance our games and other socially 
developed satisfactions of the play instincts, including the 
fine arts and the conventions on which they rest, are our 
most emancipating legacy. Men have developed expres- 
sions of their spiritual nature deeper and more satisfying 
than those that unassisted nature ever taught, the loss of 
which would leave us poor indeed. 

The tradition of most of the great games has been a long 
one. Baseball, as we know, has been a gradual evolution 
out of rounders ; and ball in one form or another goes back 
to the days of Nausicaa at least. Football traces its ancestry 
from English and German "camp ball" — which means 
Kampfen, or fight, ball and traces its lineage back to Roman 
times — down to its American development under the pro- 



PLAY AND TEACHING 39 

phetically named Walter Camp. Tennis was an ancient 
game when Macsenas played it on the famous embassy to 
Brundusium, while Horace and Virgil were kept indoors by 
weak eyes and a weak digestion. A rich play tradition is 
a precious national possession. Our present games are 
the selected fruit of centuries, survivors of a thousand forms 
of play that all the ages have discovered, the accumulated 
legacy of eternal childhood to the children of the present 
day. 

The notion that play and teaching are incompatible, 
that in order to give a child a chance to act out his own 
nature you must leave him alone, is based on a false idea 
of the nature of the child and of the relation between play 
and leadership. 

From the child's power, not merely of acquiring knowledge 
from his elders, but of being molded in accordance with 
it, ensues the vast influence of education. Man is the learn- 
ing animal, the disciple, sitting at the feet of his elders and 
being, not instructed merely, but informed by what he 
learns. The child cannot, it is true, be wholly molded, 
as unimaginative pedagogues once supposed, according to 
the whim or prejudices of his elders. There are boundaries 
set, both in his physical structure and inherited reflexes, 
beyond or aside from which he cannot be extended. The 
child himself — all that he is as an active principle — is 
contained in the great achieving instincts that direct his 
play, and it is only in the manifestation of these that he can 
be made effective. Successful schemes of education are 
consciously based upon these instincts. The kindergarten 
frankly adopts the forms of play. The Jesuit system makes 
great use of the instinct of competition. Greek education, 
the most successful the world has seen, was based largely 



40 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

on the rhythmic instinct. It is of no use to go outside the 
bounds of nature and try to educate a child who is not there. 
But within these limits there is, though not an unbounded, 
yet an infinite, variety' of choice, and in this choice momen- 
tous issues are involved. 

It is true, and most important to observe, that though 
education is thus based on play it is not all play — at least 
no good education is. A circumstance fraught with much 
misunderstanding upon this whole subject is that the first 
acquisition of what is destined to become an instrument of 
the spiritual life is not necessarily itself an exhilarating 
experience, but may, on the contrary, be mere drudgery and 
vexation. Discouraging initiation often attends the course 
of true play, from the first game of tag, in which you are 
always "it," up to the learning of irregular Greek verbs — 
a drudgery justified only by the power it ultimately confers. 
Better chisel your boat out of a hollow log than never sail 
at all. The school, foreseeing the future emancipation to 
be won, leads the pupil onward even when the road is rough 
and hard to travel. The multiplication table may not be 
a joy during the period of its acquisition, but it is a key to 
many doors you will be glad to open later on. The alphabet 
may seem hard at first — worse than learning to skate — 
but the fairyland it leads to is worth the sacrifice. 

But always the good school will put behind the drudgery 
as much of the living spirit as it can. It will recognize the 
value of making sacrifice for an ideal ; but it will not exalt 
unconsecrated sacrifice. It will recognize that drudgery 
has disciplinary value only in virtue of the motive that 
triumphs over it. 

Education — which is the promotion of growth, child cul- 
ture — will include teaching both in the school and on the 
playground; but it will never conclude, because teaching 



PLAY AND TEACHING 41 

is part of the law of growth, that it is the whole of it. It will 
not omit life itself in order to supply one necessary means 
of living. I believe that man can improve upon Nature, 
that Nature herself provides for such improvement, and that 
teaching has a most important place in education ; but I 
do not believe that we can, for that reason, ignore what 
Nature has decreed. We can supplement her law, but we 
shall not learn to supersede it. The way in which she has 
put it in the flower's heart to grow is, in its main lines, to 
be its way of growth if it ever is to grow at all. 



CHAPTER VIII 

PLAY AND GYMNASTICS 

Play demands teaching, which thus becomes a part of the 
law of growth. Children, as a result of their own instinc- 
tive tendencies, are molded upon the traditions of their 
race. And teaching, as we have seen, also usefully directs 
action, and so determines growth, even when not called for 
by the play instincts : children may sometimes profitably 
be taught what they do not desire to learn. 

What is thus true of the teaching of facts and conventions 
is true also of drill, both physical and mental — of training 
as well as of teaching in the more general sense. 

We all know that gymnastic exercises, for instance, pro- 
duce muscle although they are anything but play. It is 
evident also that a sailor or a day laborer, whose occupation 
must be largely drudgery, does nevertheless gain physical 
development. People learn the mechanics, at least, of 
playing the piano by practicing, which need not for that 
purpose be play to the performer any more than it is a joy 
to the neighbors. The same is true of many forms of skill. 
Athletic training, even when it is mere drudgery, produces 
something of the desired result. The mind itself may be 
developed by studies unwillingly pursued. Work — get- 
ting a job and sticking to it, regardless of liking or disliking 
— is probably the best promoter of the growth of young 
people at a certain stage; but this last, as we shall see in 
the next chapter, is not really an instance of going outside 
the play motives. 

42 



PLAY AND GYMNASTICS 43 

It seems, indeed, that not only play but any form of 
activity that exercises an organ will develop it. Running 
from a bull, if not indulged in to excess, must be excellent 
training for the heart and lungs. Even massage — to take 
an instance at the other extreme as regards intensity of 
interest — produces muscular growth. 

Generally speaking, whatever is exercised will grow. The 
important question then, as to any given activity from the 
educational point of view, is : What powers and organs does 
it exercise ? For it is certain, at least, that the growth in- 
duced by it will go no deeper than the action went : an organ 
not used will not be affected, nor any organ in a way that it 
was not used. Massage or gymnastics, though they will 
develop the muscles, will not reach the mind — at least 
in the way that play, using the same muscles, would have 
reached it. Nor will they establish the same relation be- 
tween mind and muscle. The arm of a gymnast is a good 
arm in its anatomical aspect, but it is not the boxer's arm, 
nor the carpenter's, nor the violinist's. It has large muscles ; 
but it is not, except in the evolutions that produced it, the 
trained servant of the brain. 

So far indeed as man is Gymnast gymnastic exercise is an 
education to him — and there is a monkey element in human 
nature that is worth appealing to at the right age. In Ger- 
many, also, Father Jahn put behind gymnastics the instinct 
of patriotism. The Turners saw the restored fatherland 
in their swelling biceps and felt that as they circled the bar 
they made the world go round — as it often seems to dizzy 
beginners in this simple-hearted evolution. In truth it is 
not always possible to know just what a given exercise will 
develop, because it is not possible to know just what it 
really is. We can see the motions of the arms and legs, but 
not the inner motives that produced them. But of this 



44 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

at least we may be sure ; that whatever the action truly 
was — whatever its depth or shallowness — the result will 
go no deeper. The surface movement will produce only 
surface results. Nothing will be strengthened or enlarged 
that was not exercised. 

The same is true of gymnastics of the mind. If they are 
mere gymnastics — the performance of certain intellectual 
movements, without the enlistment of a deeper interest — 
then, at most, only the power to repeat such movements 
will be acquired. We may in this way develop very perfect 
automata perhaps ; bits of machinery such as business 
men sometimes call upon the schools to furnish them, 
turned out to order, and all sufficiently alike to be practically 
interchangeable without unnecessary friction or expense. 
This is the way also, carried a little further, in which " smart- 
ies" are produced — little creatures "bright as a steel trap" 
who can go through the motions perfectly, show off their 
school accomplishments without slipping a cog ; and who 
manifest as much development of heart or understand- 
ing, as much enlistment in the important interests of life, 
as a mechanical doll. As Max O'Rell said of the products 
of the French schools, " The pupils learn their lessons so 
perfectly that they keep on reciting them all the rest of 
their lives." 

Surface activities produce only surface growth. If mus- 
cle disassociated from mind, or mental processes divorced 
from vital interest, were the true end of education, such 
activities would constitute the proper means. Gymnastics, 
mental and physical, are justly dear to those who hold that 
thought is dangerous. They are the next best thing to no 
education. They may even be superior from that point 
of view, as leaving both mind and body muscle-bound — 
producing an outer shell of flesh and habit that is difficult 



I 



PLAY AND GYMNASTICS 45 

to break through and may imprison thought more effectively 
than the absence of any development at all. 

But to those who desire not to insure against education 
but to promote it — who would liberate the soul, not wall 
it up forever in a living prison — mere surface activity repre- 
sents a fatal loss. The development of muscle or of intel- 
lectual facility is to these not an end but an opportunity, 
important only as a way to something more. jMuscle is 
valued not as contractile tissue but as the vehicle of will. 
The question is not of meat but of mind, and of the realiza- 
tion of vital purposes. Muscle and mind alike are organs 
of the soul, to be developed as its thoroughfare, drilled under 
its direction and to its needs. That exercise is lost in which 
they were not made more pervious to its demands. 

And as the moral purpose drills the body and brain it 
also forms itself — builds character back into the organism 
as deep as quality can go. A radical objection to mere 
gymnastics as a means of education is the absence from it 
of complete enlistment. It is a school of half-heartedness, 
inducing a habit of action that starts halfway to the surface 
instead of from the depths. A man's nature should be radial, 
proceeding from the central essence of him — single, integral, 
clear as a bell, sound as a nut, without rift or fissure or any 
half intention. There should be, between thought and act, 
no fiber that is impervious or slack, no joint that wobbles. 
Growth should, accordingly, be from the center out, should 
spring from the inmost depth from which motive power 
can be fetched. 

Even bodily development is most successfully achieved 
when the deeper forces are at work. The doctors have 
long recognized that healthful exercise is not simply a matter 
of muscular contraction. There must be an object, there 
must be interest, there must be exhilaration : to produce 



46 PLAY IN. EDUCATION 

the best results the mind as well as the body must be en- 
gaged. In short the action that cures is along the line of 
the instinctive interests. Trainers also, whether of horses 
or of men, give the same testimony. To put on weight, 
to gain or hold the fullest strength, horse or athlete must 
enjoy his work, must find play in it as he goes along. A 
leg, indeed, can push, or an arm muscle contract, in exer- 
cises prescribed by conscience, or stimulated merely by a 
desire to get strong, and increase of tissue will follow such 
exercises. But arm or leg takes little comfort in the work ; 
it does not get from it the joy of full discharge, nor reach 
its highest power as a result of it. You may put the various 
numbers through their paces — following, if you choose, 
the motions of a hunt or a football game ; but the muscles 
know the difference and will never fully respond to such 
uninspired command. To get the whole growth of any 
organ you must put your whole soul back of it, because so 
only can you get its full reaction. 

The question is one of substance and not of form. Stunts 
may take the likeness of gymnastics ; and these are a valu- 
able expression of the fighting and competing instinct. A 
setting up drill, with such further exercises as shall insure 
a minimum of bodily efficiency, may be made a ritual of 
patriotic observance and so become illuminated by the 
great team instinct. 

It is true also, in spite of all that must be said of their 
meager educational value, that even gymnastics proper — 
pure uninspired gymnastics — do have a place in the train- 
ing of the child. They are often necessary in the correction 
of faulty posture or habit or of physical malformation. But 
they should be classed with dentistry and orthopedics as 
having a surgical and corrective rather than an educational 
effect. 



PLAY AND GYMNASTICS 47 

Gymnastics have their place, but it is always a subsidiary 
one, never of the first importance. That action alone de- 
velops the whole organism in which the whole organism is 
engaged. Man is inevitably, under whatever variations, 
the incarnation of the great forth-putting instincts that 
control his play in infancy and dominate his later life — 
the instincts of creation, nurture, hunting, fighting, and the 
rest, by means of which he holds his position in the world. 
Outside the scope of these he is not found. In the deepest 
sense he is these instincts. They are the ultimate fact about 
him, his active projection into the world of being. They 
constitute the final and irreducible substance of which he 
is composed. His body is their tool, his mind and heart 
are emanations of them. A man who is not creator, nur- 
turer, scientist, fighter, hunter, poet, citizen, does not exist ; 
he must be these or nothing. You may prevent a child 
from growing up, but you cannot, by any necromancy yet 
discovered, turn him into a book or a machine. 



CHAPTER IX 

PLAY AND WORK 

Play is the form in which the major, achieving, instincts 
act and through which true growth takes place. But is 
it the only form? Our friend the kitten has been chasing 
the ball — dodging, leaping, pouncing, lying in wait, and 
springing out on it. She finds in such activity the direct 
and glad expression of her nature. But behind it all is one 
controlling motive. You can see that to her the ball stands 
for mouse — for what the mouse will some day mean to 
her — and that it will appear as such when she has got it 
fully and finally unwound. And then one day it is a mouse; 
the living creature starts before her and she pursues. Does 
her interest suddenly cease on such occasion, and with it 
the educational result? Such we know is far from being 
the case. On the contrary, all her nature wakes; she is 
suddenly all cat; her feline soul flames up in her as never 
before. At the touch of reality the last internal barrier 
gives way and her full power is born. 

In the same way the boy has been pursuing, through all 
his childish games, a phantom stag. Suddenly the real 
stag comes in sight. Is the chase less interesting on that 
account? Instead of finding out what is inside his sister's 
doll or looking for new specimens in the field or woods, he 
is now trying to solve some business problem. The sand 
pile has become a real house to work on. Whittling has 
turned into carpentry, sculpture, or manufacture. The fight 
is a real fight to make and hold a place. The team has 

48 



PLAY AND WORK 49 

become a business, a city, a country to be served. Are 
these new purposes less instinctive than the old? Are- 
they not on the contrary objects of a more passionate pur- 
suit, means of a more complete fulfillment, the reality of 
which his former interests were but the shadow ? 

Do these new more realistic fulfillments of the play in- 
stincts still deserve the name of play ? So high an authority 
as Herr Groos holds that they do not. He distinguishes 
sharply between play and those "serious" activities, serv- 
ing a practical biological purpose, for which it is the prep- 
aration. And it is true that when these activities take 
place after the period of infancy they are no longer play in 
the sense of contributing to growth — or at least not in 
anything like the same degree as formerly. But on the 
other hand, considered as what they are, not in their effects 
but in. themselves, as seen from the inside, they differ from 
what Herr Groos and everybody else recognizes as play 
only in being more intense. They proceed from identically 
the same motives, have the same method of operation, and 
afford precisely the same satisfaction, in the new relation 
as in the old. They are the operation of the same forces 
though in a more intense degree and in a larger field. 

The new and the old fulfillments of the play instincts — 
work and play — are often even identical in form. We 
think of the little girl playing with her doll, the small boy 
with his toy bow, and we say that real motherhood and real 
hunting are something very different. But the little girl 
plays also with her baby brother, and the acme of her 
satisfaction comes when her mother goes out and leaves 
him wholly in her care. Play is now in her case performing 
its "serious" biological function. You cannot say that it 
is not also work unless you confine the work of the nur- 
turing instinct either to what is paid for, thereby excluding 



50 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the mother, or to the case of physical maternity, excluding 
the paid nurse of ninety years. 

The little boy for his part shoots not only with blunt 
but with sharp arrows or with a gun ; and when he is allowed 
to go on a real hunt with his father it is the fulfillment of 
his dreams. What is the full play of the hunting instinct 
if it is not hunting ? 

The fights of gangs, to take another instinct, develop 
insensibly into the fighting bands of primeval war. Indeed 
real war among savages or in barbaric times, or as viewed 
even by modern aristocracies, in whom the barbaric tradi- 
tion is preserved, is carried on not for utilitarian ends, which 
the warrior caste has ever despised, but for its own sake as 
a form of sport. So children's mud pies develop gradually 
into huts built as well as their tools and materials will 
allow, often better than the real houses of their early human 
ancestors. The obsession of the small boy is carpentry, 
and his achievements in that direction will often overlap 
in practicality those later recognized as work. 

Membership, again, whether in team or gang, grows 
insensibly, as we shall see, into political and social conscious- 
ness. As for rhythm and curiosity, the expression of these 
in play takes from the first identically the same forms 
which later, as art and science, are recognized as among 
our most serious pursuits. And there is an element of art 
or science in all first-rate achievement, in good work of any 
kind. 

The truth is that each play instinct finds in appropriate 
work the heart of its desire, a satisfaction like the old, but 
with a new reality added. It has tasted blood. Real life 
is normally not the antithesis but the completed form of 
play, its apotheosis, the coming true of all it prophesied. 
We have all seen the effect on a boy or young man of getting 



PLAY AND WORK 51 

a job. If it is a real job, with responsibility in it, and if it 
does not come too soon, it is the most rapid known promoter 
of his education. Under its influence the boy becomes 
suddenly a man. You can see it in his face the first eve- 
ning; it will affect his bodily form and carriage within a 
week. Real work is not a denial, but a fulfillment of the 
great play instincts. As such it is a very potent means 
of growth. 

Grown-up work, it is true, does not represent reality 
to the little child. To him the sand house is still the real 
one and the social order is represented not in business or 
political organizations, but in the ring game. The making 
of a great big house to live in — if he is so fortunate as to 
witness that operation — is indeed a fascinating thing to 
watch, as it is fascinating to grown-up people to watch 
the stars or to study the growth of trees. The carpenter 
is to him a hero, a Daedalus, a Wayland Smith revisiting 
this fairy-haunted world ; but his work is, like the growing 
of the grass, the passing of the seasons, a cosmic fact wholly 
outside the sphere of one's own practical pursuits. The ball 
team also, during its early swa}', is more real than any grown- 
up institution. Democrat, Republican, firm, or corporation, 
are as yet mythical and unreal. Governor, president, direc- 
tor, general manager, are shadowy figures, far off, lacking 
the color and compelling reality of pitcher, short or half- 
back. Play is the work of childhood, which no precocious 
interest in grown-up tasks can supersede. Home work, it 
is true, is real from an early age because home membership 
is also real ; but work in other forms is still barren of the 
serious interest that belongs to play. 

At a certain age, however, there comes a change. At 
fourteen or thereabouts both boy and girl begin to see their 
grown-up life as real. A real home for themselves first 



52 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

looms as possible, then opens out as the most real thing 
there is. The same thing happens in the case of other 
grown-up interests. From fourteen to twenty-one — the 
apprentice years, justly recognized as such by our forbears 
— work and play, the grown-up world and the child's world, 
each contain reality. Baseball and holding down or prepar- 
ing for a job are both real life and both accordingly have an 
educational effect. Finally the new kind of satisfaction 
becomes the keener, the real mouse is more compelling than 
the ball of yarn, the swaying grass blade, or the mother's 
writhing tail, laying brick more satisfying than making a 
hut back in the wood lot, running an engine more real than 
running for a fly, and we say the infant is grown up. After 
twenty-one work alone — taken in the broadest sense — 
is wholly real or most deeply educational. 

True work is the highest form of play; but it is always 
the play element in work that is the most important. The 
play motive is the deepest and most serious. It is deeper 
than the hungers : the artist starves himself for art ; the 
student renounces love and fortune to vindicate his vision 
of the truth ; the artisan postpones reward to workmanship. 
The master of any calling cares for his work first ; the pay 
is secondary. Policemen, firemen, nurses, doctors, engineers, 
are every day giving their lives in obedience to a deeper 
instinct than the love of life. What we mean by a profes- 
sion — i.e. by work that is taken seriously — is the pre- 
dominance in it of interest in the work itself over ulterior 
motives. The kitten doubtless will eat the mouse when 
she has killed him ; hunger may be a subsidiary motive 
in the chase, but it is not the strongest motive. It is neither 
the original explosive nor the directing force; it gives no 
specific powers, but only serves to bribe the powers that 
exist. What generates force, grants inspiration — what 



PLAY AND WORK 53 

transcends the instruments it finds and carries the whole 
creature beyond himself — is the active, forth-putting in- 
stinct, the outcropping in his heart of those purposes that 
created and still sustain him. The instincts to which this 
power belongs are the same in work and play, the same 
identical motives inspiring each. 

"Not in the ground of need, not in bent and painful 
toil, but in the deep-centered play-instinct of the world, in 
the joyous mood of the eternal Being, which is always young, 
Science has her origin and root; and her spirit, which is 
the spirit of genius in moments of elevation, is but a sub- 
limated form of play, the austere and lofty analogue of the 
kitten playing with the entangled skein, or of the eaglet 
sporting with the mountain winds." So sings Professor Key- 
ser of Columbia, a mathematician who has gone deep enough 
to catch the play spirit of the spheres. Of course science 
is play — real science, that is to say, the science that is 
the true adventure of the mind. It is the play of the great 
instinct, curiosity — exploring the universe, learning with 
joy its story, as the child follows up the brook or listens to 
the murmur in the shell. 

Of course art is play — the linking together of forms and 
tones and colors, of voices and rhythms, in obedience to 
the infinite leadings of the creative instinct. 

Even industry is truly valuable for the play element that 
it contains. It is true, our civilization has discovered forms 
of industrial work that do not satisfy the human instincts 
as did that industrial system which Mother Nature designed 
us to pursue — not even the peaceful instincts of nurture, 
construction, rhythm. We have invented drudgery and 
condemned whole populations to it as their part in life, and 
have thereby introduced a tragedy of disappointed powers 
that is the serious problem of our modern world. 



54 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

But the virtue which still persists in daily work, even in 
its most desiccated form — and it is a saving virtue after 
all — is in its satisfaction of at least one of the great play 
instincts. The mark of work is duty. Its essence is re- 
sponsibility, discharge of obligation. What we mean by 
work is doing our part, taking our share of the burden, hold- 
ing up our end. Work is not necessarily paid — witness 
that of mothers, housewives, scientists, soldiers, leaders 
of thought and conduct. Pay is an evidence of service, 
not of the essence of it. But work is necessarily something 
required of us ; its essence is the fulfillment of social obliga- 
tion. And the sense of social obligation, of holding up our 
end, is a part of the sense of membership. It is a manifes- 
tation of the great belonging instinct. The laws of society 
would not run through us and command our will if 
we were not by nature parts of society, and if it were not a 
part of us. Duty and responsibility are motives that 
attach to us as social beings. 

Work in short is a function of the great team instinct. 
It is the fulfillment by us in our individual capacity of the 
law of the social whole. The worker is the stone compelled 
into its place, bearing its particular strain according to the 
law of the arch. To the young savage work is war ; to the 
Greek it was civic service, philosophy, or art ; to the Roman 
patrician, administration. It is to any man or woman that 
which the community requires of them. The reason home 
work is real to a small child is because, as I have said, he 
is already a true member of the home, and his team sense 
applies to service in fulfillment of his membership. The 
instinct that gives work its special quality, this leading and 
authoritative instinct, on which our whole social morality 
is built, is the same belonging instinct that makes the job 
of quarter-back a serious affair. The reason getting a job 



PLAY AND WORK 55 

transforms a young man's life is that it satisfies the gang 
instinct within him — the instinct to make good, to be some- 
body as a member of the society to which he happens 
to belong. It is as a satisfaction of the great team sense 
that work is so powerful a means of growth. 

If it is objected to the above statement that work is not 
alwaj's a satisfaction of the team instinct, that the cat fulfills 
no social obligation in catching mice nor the spider in making 
a web, that there may even be men — Robinson Crusoes, 
or men of a Robinson Crusoe disposition whose nature is a 
desert isle at which the ships that weave the social obliga- 
tions never touch — whose toil is purely to avoid hunger, 
without any motive of making good : if such objection is 
raised, I answer that if such desiccated remainder of hunger- 
driven toil can properly be considered work for human beings, 
even then the argument is not affected but only the definition 
of a word. With the elimination of the play element of 
loyalty, the most serious element in work, and all that gave 
it nobility, will have disappeared. 

/T*lay thus includes all action in obedience to the great 
achieving instincts as distinguished from the hungers. It 
not only creates the child, but is the life also of the grown . 
man, the active principle that sustains him and in the func- 
tioning of which he has his true expression^ Work is the 
highest power of play. That it usually contains also the 
other ingredient which we call drudgery is an important fact 
and one that must be dealt with later on. The thing to 
note here is that the soul of it is the play motive. 

All pursuits that justify themselves are play. Play is 
the service of ultimates, or rather it is the ultimate itself, 
the satisfaction of authoritative instinct. It is imnlediate 
living as distinguished from the provision of means. It 
represents the non-utilitarian motive. The useful is that 



56 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

which is justified by something else ; play asks no justifica- 
tion and needs none. Beauty, the aim and flower of all 
true play, does not exist for other things, but all else for it. 
It is itself the end, the final up-against-it, that which gives 
value to the rest. Life is, in the last analysis, a sporting 
proposition. 



CHAPTER X 

EVIDENCE 

That play really is the positive element in the great phe- 
nomenon of infancy, the method by which Nature provides 
that her children shall grow up, seems to me the only reason- 
able conclusion from the facts already cited and from the 
more detailed account of children's play to be found in the 
remainder of this book. 

But in case there is doubt in the reader's mind as to this 
important thesis, the following provisional summary of the 
facts bearing thereon may be of service. 

I. In the first place, play exercises body and mind in the 
actions toward which their growth is in fact directed. It 
bids the hands to grasp and the legs to run. It calls upon 
the heart and lungs for such support to violent exertion as 
they do actually become fitted to give. The exercises it 
prescribes call for bone and muscle, for bodily habits and 
nervous coordinations, exactly such as are found in the 
well-developed man. The full-grown healthy body, respon- 
sive to the human mind, is such as play might be expected 
to secrete. 

The mature mind also, in its main characteristics, is such 
as the play instincts call for ; human nature as we all recog- 
nize it is a realization of their prophecy. That man or 
woman comes nearest to the full stature of humanity who is 
most fully a creator, nurturer, citizen, and the rest, as they 
prescribe. What we call a liberal education is education in 
the humanities, — so named at the time of the Rebirth of 

57 



58 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Man — that education which most fully liberates the great 
human instincts which govern children's play. 

II. Secondly, play activity follows the order of actual 
growth. The wielding, manipulating, walking, chasing, 
wrestling plays are severally contemporaneous with the 
development of the bones and muscles and nerve centers 
on which these activities depend. Physiologists find a close 
correspondence between the development of various parts of 
the brain and that of the play interests which correspond. 
For us who have never dissected a brain it is enough to 
observe that the mental powers — as for instance of com- 
petition, investigation, cooperation — become established at 
the instinctive periods, respectively, of plays that call for 
them. We can at least say that if play were the cause of 
growth it would be related to it, both as to form and se- 
quence, precisely as it is. 

III. I think most people who have watched children grow 
up will testify that they develop more fully and normally 
if they have an opportunity to play than if they have not. 
Absolute deprivation of such opportunity — and therefore 
the evidence of its effects — is rare. The only large class of 
instances I know of is that of infants in asylums of the old- 
fashioned sort, in which they are institution "cases" with- 
out substitute mothers or much individual care. The 
annual death rate in these institutions was, and I believe 
still is, over 90 per cent ; and in the opinion of experts this 
is due not to physical causes alone, but partly to the lack of 
mothering, which to all infants means chiefly the mother- 
play. These cases present therefore some direct evidence 
of the necessity of play to life and growth. 

IV. It may perhaps be queried whether the apparent 
causal connection does not run the other way. " Of course," 
it may be said, "the child does not use his powers until he 



EVIDENCE 59 

has them. He cannot run without legs, nor climb until his 
arms are strong enough. When he feels his strength he uses 
it, but it does not follow that the use causes the strength." 
There is an obvious truth in this suggestion. The child 
cannot in fact run without legs nor play ball without hands ; 
without a body of some sort he could not play at all. Play 
must build always on the growth already won. 

But play does not follow physical growth ; it is not a by- 
product. And though it is in a sense the twin effect of a 
common cause, it is the enterprising twin, the one in whom 
initiative appears. The play of children, as actually ob- 
served, always aims beyond existing powers. Desire in- 
variably outruns performance. There is a surplus of inten- 
tion which carries attainment ever a little higher but never 
gets quite embodied in present act. A child learning to 
walk is not driven to do so by a pair of full-formed legs 
that crave such exercise. On the contrary, the time he 
insists upon that form of effort is the very period in which 
his legs will not support him, although prophetic of the 
power to do so. He practices walking in spite of bumps 
and failures, not because he can walk, but because he can't 
— or rather because nature has whispered "walk" and he, 
without further argument, accepts the adventure as the one 
self-justifying end of life. Legs, as an effective power, 
appear first in a kicking, then in a pushing, then in a w^alk- 
ing, impulse; and each impulse successively, through the 
child's obedience to it, gets itself translated into bone and 
muscle. 

So a child practices building with his blocks not because 
his hand is equal to the task : the period in which he puts 
most passion into architectural pursuits is while he is still 
clumsy and encounters ten failures to one success. As 
always, he is reaching for something beyond himself — not 



60 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

pushed from behind by a surplus of power and talent, but 
drawn on from in front by an inspiring goal. His play is a 
struggle onward, not a self-satisfied review. He knows dis- 
appointment — even to throwing the evil-intentioned block 
away for failing him at a crisis — and crows when success 
ensues. And so throughout play life : catching a faster 
runner, making a better throw, a longer hit, a more daring 
climb — always a new stunt, a fresh perfection — is the goal. 
Play is ever the reclamation of new territory, it is the child's 
nature reaching out for fresh worlds to conquer. Ilabit, 
reflex, and coordination ; muscle, bone, and lung power ; 
follow in its wake. 

Similar to the suggestion that bodily structure may direct 
the course of play, rather than vice versa, is Herbert Spencer's 
theory that play is the result of surplus energy. The play- 
ing animal, he thinks, has more vital force than he needs for 
purposes of subsistence, reproduction, and defence against 
his enemies, and the surplus bursts out of him in play. But 
as Herr Groos has pointed out, this theory does not account 
for the particular form of play, nor for the fact, which he has 
observed, that animals will sometimes play when they are 
tired. Children, of course, frequently exhaust themselves, 
to the danger point and beyond, in their games and races. 

That play does have a particular form, that kittens play 
in one way, puppies in another, young lambs in a third, etc., 
will I suppose be generally conceded. That children es- 
pecially have instinctive tendencies to play in certain definite 
ways is a proposition that will be abundantly illustrated as 
this book proceeds. Meantime I may cite some facts that 
point in the same direction. W. W. Newell for instance, in 
his "Games and Songs of American Children," points out 
that most of our American games are found all over Europe, 
that some have a range covering nearly the whole world, 



EVIDENCE 61 

and that many are extremely ancient. Aristotle attributes 
the invention of the rattle to Archimedes. Balls were used 
for playing at least as long ago as Atalanta, or her inventor. 
Dolls are found in the pyramids of Egypt and in the Cata- 
combs. In the New Testament there is the case cited 
of children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fel- 
lows, and saying. We have piped unto you, and ye have 
not danced ; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not 
lamented, which evidently refers to some sort of clap in and 
hiss out game such as still exists. Dramatic representations, 
dancing, and ball games are found among many, if not in- 
deed among all, savage tribes. Many other instances of 
parallelism in distant times and places and degrees of civili- 
zation could be cited. 

The surplus energy theory is correct in one sense. If the 
animal had no energy unexpended he would not play. In 
the same sense Raphael produced the Sistine Madonna 
because he was possessed of surplus paint. But it is also 
true that to account either for play or for the Madonna 
there must be some more positive principle at work. 

Causes are not visible in this world except to the intro- 
spection of a conscious agent. Nobody can see that play 
causes growth any more than he can see what makes a stone 
drop or salt dissolve. But we can see that growth follows 
play, takes the form it calls for and at the time it calls, and 
we can partly see that it does not take place without it. 
I believe the difficulty, if there is any, in recognizing chil- 
dren's play as the directing principle of growth is chiefly in 
the fact, already mentioned, that the evidence of it is so 
familiar. It is a power that is almost visibly at work in 
every child during every waking hour of the day, and it is 
hard to stand away far enough to get a realizing view of it. 



BOOK 11. THE BABY AGE 
CHAPTER XI 

THE FOUR AGES OF CHILDHOOD 

Play is growth under the supervision of the great achiev- 
ing instincts, the chief of which are hunting, fighting, creation, 
rhythm, nurture, curiosity, and team play. These form the 
constant element in the child's life and become the warp of 
the resulting fabric. 

But these instincts are not all equally active all the time. 
Every one knows that a growing child passes through suc- 
cessive phases. The games that most delight him in the 
nursery are scornfully rejected during the succeeding period : 
the ring-around-a-rosy loses its magic power, the hobby- 
horse is bequeathed to a younger brother or turned out to 
pasture on the rubbish pile, the mud pie is stricken from the 
bill of fare. And as the eight-year-old scoffs at games of 
make-believe, so also the budding half-back despises tag 
and prisoner's base; while, on the other hand, the child of 
four feels no need of competition nor the subadolescent of 
team play. There is a change not merely in games but in 
the child's whole attitude toward life. From dwelling in a 
world of imagination he turns, superficially at least, first 
into the most literal disciple of the Baconian school and then, 
in the case of boys, into a member of the fierce man-pack of 
the pre-barbaric period. And these stages follow each 
other, in spite of vast individual differences, in a fairly uni- 
form and regular progression. 

62 



THE FOUR AGES OF CHILDHOOD 63 

The great play instincts, in fact, do not all appear quite 
at the beginning nor all at once. Some are on hand and 
directing the child's growth almost from the very first. Some 
are held back for several years : team play, the last to ap- 
pear, waits till the age of eleven or thereabouts. And each 
instinct has its time of stress, its special vogue, during which 
it lays siege to the mind and makes its principal impression 
on the resulting growth. There is, as Froebel long since 
taught, and as the more prosaic psychologists are beginning 
to discover, in the life of the child, as in all kinds of life, a 
gradual unfolding and a special time when each power has 
its preferred opportunity to assert itself. There is a time for 
impersonation, a time for construction, a time for running 
games, as truly as there is a time for puberty or for the 
sixth-year molar. The sequence is as fixed in mental as in 
bodily growth. The whole tree is already present in the 
seed, but there is a budding-off time for each of the great 
branches of which its final form is to consist. 

Not only do the different instincts unfold at different 
times, but each instinct appears in successive incarnations. 
We shall see, for instance, that curiosity, which first urges 
the child, through dramatizing, to get the feel of things and 
people from the inside, afterwards insists on testing their 
practical effect. The constructive instinct, which first pre- 
scribes mud pies, is afterwards expressed not only in every 
variety of material structure, but in song and poetry, in 
social organization, and even in theories and hypotheses. 
The ring-around-a-rosy is reincarnated in the home, the 
baseball team, the business organization, the state and nation. 
The continuous scraps of the pugnacious youth have their 
flower in social and business courage or become incarnate in 
the fighting leader of a peace society. 

And the first form of an instinct may be very different 



r 



64 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

from that which it is destined finally to assume — a fact 
not yet recognized, even in this day of the apotheosis of 
evolution, by those educators who, in their zeal for what 
they deem the practical, insist on pinning the fruit to the 
first sprout that appears above the ground. The voluble 
infant is not necessarily the budding lawyer, nor does absorp- 
tion in the illnesses of dolls presage a medical career. The 
future architect may find his sense of form first in music or 
in dancing. The infant statesman is very probably exercis- 
ing his eloquence in showing that he was not out at first ; 
his oration against Catiline is rehearsed as he points out to 
comrade or opponent the exact nature and degree of his 
error in some point of the game. More likely still, it is the 
persistence, nerve, and self-control which the game demands 
that will most contribute to his forensic power. Indeed 
there is almost a presumption that the spiritual force develop- 
ing in any given play will not, in adult life, appear in anything 
resembling its present form. If it looks like a rose now it 
may develop into something very beautiful, but the chances 
are that it will not be a rose. 

As an explanation of the progression in the form and 
emphasis of children's play, there is undoubted truth in 
what is called the theory of recapitulation — the idea that 
in the sequence of his play impulses the child repeats the 
story of the race, reaching the successive stages of growth 
in the order in which his ancestors passed through them. 
The facts, including those of embryology, seem to justify 
this supposition. Nature indeed, as Herr Groos has pointed 
out, does not feel obliged to stick too closely to the ancient 
text; she has told the story so often that she has learned 
to slur over the less interesting passages and to give special 
attention to the more important ; but the plot, and the 
sequence of the principal scenes, is much the same. 



THE FOUR AGES OF CHILDHOOD 65 

The theory is illuminating in its suggestion of what to 
look for, but it should not be allowed to run away with us. 
We are not required to find that the development of the 
child exactly proves the theory, or to make it do so. Obser- 
vation is after all the only test. Above all, we should not 
get confused upon the moral issue. We are under no obli- 
gation to put our children through a tedious course of un- 
edifying experience because their ancestors were so unfor- 
tunate as to be subjected to it. Primitive man has no moral 
standing in the case. The question is not what he did or 
suffered, but what we want. Not his misfortunes or short- 
comings, but our own moral sense must be our guide. 

It results from the successive appearance, varying phases, 
and differing periods of stress, of the several play instincts 
that there are distinct periods of growth. Childhood is 
thus divided into different ages, fairly well marked, each 
dominated by one or more instincts that color for a time 
the whole process of development. 

First there is the period of babyhood, from birth to about 
three years old, during which the child's life is largely in his 
relation to his mother. Then comes the dramatic age, from 
three to six, in which the impulse to impersonate colors 
almost all of his activity. Next appears the age of self- 
assertion, or Big Injun age, from six to eleven, dominated 
largely by the fighting instinct ; and then the age of loyalty 
from eleven on. The first two ages are the same in boys 
and girls. In the third there is a little difference in char- 
acter and some in dates. In the age of loyalty the divergence 
is very marked. 

These ages are of course not separated by hard and fast 
lines. They not only shade into each other but they overlap. 
The dramatic impulse, for instance, shows itself very early, 
— I have known a little girl to put her doll to sleep before 



66 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

she was a year old — and continues, though in a subordinate 
capacity, until long after its special period, — sometimes 
even beyond the fourteenth year. So also the impulse of 
self-assertion often shows itself before the age of six; and 
though it loses its dominating position when the age of 
loyalty begins, it nevertheless continues, in a subordinate 
capacity, through the rest of childhood and indeed through 
life. And loyalty itself is not suddenly born full-fledged 
when the child becomes eleven years old, but has its roots 
running back to the very beginning, even to the first mother 
play. But though not separated by definite boundaries, 
these different phases clearly enough exist and are very 
generally recognized. 

In practical dealing with children in their play such 
recognition is very important. A kind of play that suits a 
child at the dramatic age will almost certainly disgust a Big 
Injun, while what is a necessity of life to the latter may be 
wholly uninteresting in the succeeding period. The prin- 
cipal criticisms of the kindergarten are based upon its 
obvious inappropriateness to the Big Injun age. Such 
criticisms are in reality commendations, for if the kinder- 
garten did fit the Big Injun, it would be largely meaningless 
to the child of the preceding dramatic age whom it was 
designed to serve. 

Not only is it essential in all educational work to distin- 
guish the different periods of growth, but it is necessary to 
observe, within each period, the budding-off place of each 
major instinct. I once knew a small dog whose hind legs 
had been injured when he was a puppy, and who in conse- 
quence had first learned to run on his front legs — in a most 
ludicrous position, like a man walking on his hands. The 
result was that, although he had afterwards learned to run 
in the usual canine position, he always, whenever he got 



THE FOUR AGES OF CHILDHOOD 67 

excited and wanted to go especially fast, cocked himself up 
on his front legs and so could make but little progress. His 
front legs having got their education when he was, as regards 
locomotion, in the learning business — while his hind legs 
had put off their training until after that time was passed 
—it resulted that whenever the depths were stirred his 
hind legs were automatically switched off and his front legs 
switched on. His mis-education at the stage when learning 
to run was his especial business was thus a perpetual handi- 
cap. A failure of any education at all at that time would 
have been less disabling. 

The stress that Nature lays upon certain impulses at cer- 
tain times is not a casual or an isolated suggestion on her 
part. It means that she has made all her arrangements to 
have the prescribed exercises registered in actual growth at 
just those seasons. The brain centers that direct the pre- 
scribed activities are then being developed ; the muscles 
and bones especially needed in their execution are getting 
their set and girth. It is the time at which precisely those 
exercises will take. And at no other moment will they take 
so well. 

With some instincts indeed it is now or never : they cease 
altogether and leave no trace if not salted away in habit 
during their special period. William James believed that 
such was the general law of instinct, and cited to that effect, 
among other evidence, the fact that a chicken will learn to 
follow the hen, or apparently any kind of animal that walks 
before it, during the first few days after it leaves the shell ; 
but, if advantage is not taken of this brief period to give the 
instinct a chance to operate, it will never learn to follow 
anybody. The instinct lapses, and if not registered as a 
habit while it is still in force, will have no permanent effect. 

In man the more important instincts, at least, do not 



68 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

actually lapse, though some phases of them pass away. But 
their time of stress passes, and with it the time when they 
can be most effectively stamped upon the body and mind. 
If you want to make a baseball player or a violinist you must 
catch him young. The reason the artists of the Renaissance 
possessed the technique of their profession as a second 
nature, a fit vehicle for their mature genius when it came, 
was that they learned it young. Their hands were trained 
during the manual period of growth. The hands of modern 
artists have in most cases waited until it was too late, so 
that they always hesitate and stammer. They do not 
know the business themselves but have to be forever 
prompted by the mind. The modern Pegasus is generally 
half trained because he was no longer a colt when his educa- 
tion started. 

It is the same with more everyday accomplishments; 
with writing, dancing, general handiness. It is so, ap- 
parently, in the case of every instinct. Few men have skill 
or joy in shooting or fishing who did not learn it j^oung. 
A boy who does not play and scrap with other boys when he 
is a boy will always be a little maidenly — the good mixer is 
made, or at least confirmed in his enviable capacity, at an 
early age. If you would acquire a French accent you must 
prevail upon your parents to get you a French governess 
when you are about two years old ; you are then in the 
talking business, learning not merely words (your vocabu- 
lary is not so remarkable as your mother thinks), but what is 
of more consequence in this connection, the sounds of which 
your words through life will be made up. And so of music, 
of love of plants and animals, of interest in nature, of con- 
structive imagination, of power along each of the great 
radii of the expanding soul. It is so even of such special 
acquisitions as a love of Scott or Dickens. 



THE FOUR AGES OF CHILDHOOD 69 

In short the fact of first importance as regards the child 
is that he grows, that, Hke every growing thing, he passes 
through successive periods, and that a period once passed 
will not return. Carpe diem, make hay while the sun shines, 
strike while the iron is hot — proverbial admonition to time- 
liness applies with especial force in education. In matters 
of growth opportunity does not recur. When Nature asks 
your cooperation in her plans she means now : time is of 
the essence of the offer. In the development of the growing 
child potential faculties, in the form of instinctive impulse, 
appear each in its turn, asking to be woven into the fabric 
of his life. To the extent to which each impulse is followed 
the corresponding faculty is acquired, and the pattern 
becomes so far complete. If the prompting is ignored, the 
opportunity passes and the power it offered is foregone. An 
instinct must be made welcome when it knocks, or the man 
will never possess the power to give it utterance. It is 
true, the major human instincts, if thus neglected, do not 
absolutely lapse; they survive as vague desires, longings 
unfulfilled, a hindrance rather than a means of life. 

In brief there is a tide in the affairs of childhood which 
taken at the flood leads on to Man — and which must be 
so taken if such destiny is ever to be reached. The fairies 
come bearing each her gift, but the child must reach out and 
take it or it is withdrawn. 



CHAPTER XII 

WHY GROWN-UPS DO NOT UNDERSTAND 

There is one consequence of the existence of successive 
stages of growth, with their different prepossessions about 
what is worth doing and the resulting different forms of 
play, which is of some importance in itself and of verj'- great 
importance in its effect upon the grown-up view of children's 
play. I mean the passing of a given sort of play activity 
from a primary to a secondary place in the life and interest of 
the individual. 

A form of play which has for a time held the center of 
the stage does not, as a rule, when its special vogue has 
ended and the stress of the vital impulse has passed on to 
other manifestations, cease altogether from among the child's 
interests, but survives in an attenuated form. The boy of 
the Big Injun age condescends to play soldier with his little 
sister. The high school youth occasionally unbends in a 
game of three old cats. The college senior who is so fortu- 
nate as not to be a member of any representative nine, con- 
tinues nevertheless to play baseball, though in a rollicking, 
care-free spirit, very different from the deadly earnest of 
his high school or freshman days. Grown people are even 
more apt than their juniors, if given a fair chance unterrified 
by the censorious eyes and solemn restraining influence of 
their own children, to be foolish in such ways : properly 
encouraged they will play not only tennis and baseball but 
prisoners' base, duck-on-a-rock — even bean bag or farmer 
in the dell — with much spirit and abandon. 

70 



WHY GROWN-UPS DO NOT UNDERSTAND 71 

Nature seems to desire this sort of renewal of the old 
experiences, this playful revival of those " beautiful days of 
youth when we were so unhappy." She wants her children 
to go over their back lessons, to make sure they have not 
forgotten something. But she wants it done in a not too 
careful way. You should be free of the ball field now, having 
won the right to play — in this new and frivolous sense — 
with what was once, both to you and her, no joking matter. 

It is to this reminiscent, secondary form of play that the 
word play is especially applied by grown people. It is such 
return to the form, but not the substance, of our youthful 
games that gives to most of us our sole idea of what play is. 

And so, because what was once advance has now become 
review, because what formerly possessed the seriousness of 
life and death is now a matter only of recreation, we think it 
was always so. The "old man" thinks baseball is baseball 
and, forgetful of his own boyhood, assumes that what it now 
is to him it always was, and must be to his son. He con- 
cedes the necessity of "wholesome exercise," believes in 
walks, and even thinks amusement a good thing ; but asks 
what is the fun of going at it with such a disproportioned 
seriousness, getting tired, worrying about who wins. He 
may not ask the hero of the winning team, as his mother 
sometimes does, whether he is not getting overheated ; but 
he is only a little less out of it than that. Hence the mis- 
*^, understanding between fathers and sons, mothers and 
/ daughters, the grown-up world and that forgotten world of 
childhood ; hence the failure to see in play the one most 
serious business of every child. 

There are, it is true, fathers who take a different view 
of a certain class of games, to whom baseball is still a matter 
of life and death. But these, in applying their mature 
business attitude of mind to their son's pursuits, and in 



72 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

regarding victory not as part of the game, but as a business 
object for which the play and training represent simply the 
necessary outlay, pervert the natural play attitude, and are, 
upon the whole, the greatest nuisance in the educational 
world to-day. The same thing is largely true of college 
alumni and the sort of pressure they bring upon the under- 
graduates. In such cases there is a seeming memory of the 
seriousness of play which is, however, in reality the imposing 
upon play of a false and alien seriousness. 

But as to all kinds of play except high school and college 
sports — and for the most part in the case of these also — 
grown people naively assume that play is to the child what it 
would be to them to do the same things, outwardly speak- 
ing, that the child is doing. Mothers indeed usually do 
understand their babies, and know a little something even 
about their children of the dramatic age. They do not for 
the most part assume that paddling in the water is to their 
five-year-old just what it would be to them. But as to chil- 
dren beyond the age of six the understanding even of mothers 
mostly stops. "My dear child, how can you like to get 
your hands so dirty?" "What is the fun of playing with 
the pigs?" "I don't go swinging on the gate, throwing 
snowballs at the butcher, and getting my dress torn in that 
dreadful way : why should you f " Even if they refrain 
from saying it, that is usually the sort of thing they think. 

A certain pale interest in the child's normal pursuits most 
grown people will concede as natural — the interest of a shade 
revisiting his former haunts ; but that these pursuits should 
be, as they really are, matters of life and death passes their 
power of imagination. In fact the one point of view that 
does seem to survive in full force from their own childhood 
is the inability to understand those younger than them- 
selves. Just as the boy of eight thinks that it is silly of his 



WHY GROWN-UPS DO NOT UNDERSTAND 73 

little sister to play ring-around-a-rosy, so the boy's father 
and mother, equally simple-hearted, think that he also is 
silly whenever he revolts at a course of action prescribed to 
him on the theory that he is merely an undersized man of 
forty, and insists upon going about his really important 
affairs. V 

In short we grown-ups see the form of play and not the 
substance, and because that form could now contain for us 
nothing of serious importance we assume that the same 
must be true for our children also. We do not see that to 
the child his play is his real life ; the expression in him of 
the same instincts, in the same imperative mood, that govern 
our own most cherished work. 



CHAPTER XIII 

MOTHER PLAY 

Every mother will remember the first time her first baby 
smiled at her. She can still recall that wan ray that wavered 
across his hitherto complete solemnity, — so brief that she 
could hardly believe, the next moment, that the miracle had 
happened. And certainly in some ways it seems a miracle. 
How did the baby know that there was anywhere in the 
world someone who could understand ? From what experi- 
ence did he deduce the existence of mutual sympathy? 
Had he studied the combined sensations that his mother 
produced in him and inferred that she must be a conscious 
being like himself ? The trouble is that he was not a con- 
scious being and did not know he had a self. In truth he 
did not learn about his mother's sympathy from external 
evidence at all. All that experience told him was "This is 
she." He had instinctively expected her. And his smile is 
in recognition that his expectation is fulfilled. 

The child assumes the presence of his mother in spirit as 
inevitably as in the flesh. He turns to her eyes for sym- 
pathy as instinctively as to her breast for food. The baby's 
smile goes forth into the world as the messenger of an un- 
conscious faith, evidence of an intuitive presumption that eyes 
were made to see and hearts to understand. The child does 
not proceed by the inductive method, inferring his mother 
from the observed phenomena. He leaps by a single intuition 
into the heart of this relation. What he does in the fulfill- 
ment of it is an elaboration upon a whole already divined. 

74 



MOTHER PLAY 75 

This vast assumption of the presence of at least one con- 
scious being possessed of sympathetic interest is to be hence- 
forth the basis of the child's life. His mother is not merely 
a part of his environment ; she is his world, the medium in 
which all his acts take place, the atmosphere wherein he 
lives and moves. There will be henceforth a social dimen- 
sion to every happening, a social reference in all he does. 
The exploit is not real to him until he sees it reflected in her 
eyes. She is his public, his test of significance, his standard 
of the real. 

There is no end to the variety or the depth of mutual 
understanding that the child seeks and finds in this relation- 
ship. Watch any baby playing with his mother — the 
meeting and parting, pretended quarrel and reconciliation, 
yielding and opposition, confirmation and surprise — and 
you will see that there is no form of mutual sympathy, no 
shade or incidence of joke or challenge or repartee, that these 
two do not share. The basic social achievement of establish- 
ing community of feeling between two human beings is ac- 
complished through the medium of instinctive mother play. 

It is in this, his earliest social world, this happy society 
of two which he is born into, that the child first finds his life. 
Without it even his physical existence will hardly be con- 
tinued. The death rate in infant asylums is, as I have said, 
over 90 per cent a year, partly because the child in such 
institutions lacks his natural playmate, because not merely 
the physical basis of his life but the spiritual counterpart is 
absent. 

The social instinct of children of this first age — from 
birth to three years old — is chiefly toward their elders ; 
their need of association with their contemporaries is as yet 
but very slight. But among grown people their acquaint- 
ance begins very early to enlarge. Other characters besides 



76 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the mother are introduced. The baby finds, for instance, 
that he prefers to be carried by a man. One of these rougher, 
more exciting, creatures is also very good to ride on, to have 
toss one "up in the yayer," and to supply other cataclysmic 
and exhilarating experiences. Children like the strength 
of men, the feeling of protection of strong arms and hearty 
reassuring voices, the robust outside atmosphere of these 
breezy visitors. They sink back with completest resignation 
and contentment when their father carries and sings to 
them. 

Conversely, the nurturing instinct seems to be almost as 
strong in men as it is in women. It is a significant fact that 
in some races of monkeys the male as well as the female 
gives suck to the young, and that in our own race the man 
has rudimentary mammary glands. The mother sense is in 
the father also ; and the child instinctively sustains the 
other half of this relation. Whether or not there is any his- 
torical connection between fatherhood and fighting — we all 
can give our guess upon the subject — I think I have ob- 
served that the most pugnacious boys are softest with little 
children. I remember instances of such who delighted 
especially in putting their heads in a baby's lap and allowing 
him to pull their hair. 

Physical contact plays an important part in establishing 
these first social relations. People's love for their children 
grows by playing roly poly games with them. And the 
effect of touch, especially with the hand, is reciprocal. The 
child's affection grows as his hands pass over his mother's 
face, whether in solemn appraisal or in saucy challenge, or 
as he holds them over her mouth when she tries to speak. 
Children do not like to be mauled. Tickling has few if any 
merits. But the mother is not foolish in her desire to hug 
her baby : the spiritual bond is tightened along with the 



MOTHER PLAY 77 

physical. And the father need not be morbidly afraid of 
coddling. Mother Nature, who prompts it, had seen a few 
billion babies grow up before he was born, and she knows 
perhaps as much as he about the baby business. 

An interesting and momentous expression of the social 
instinct in children of this age is that of language. The 
sources of this greatest of our institutions are visible in their 
instinctive play. The essence of conversation, the meeting 
of two minds, long precedes ability to talk. Mother and 
child understand one another before any word has been 
spoken on the one side, or any sensible and articulate syllable 
upon the other, with a depth and confidence that would 
require a hundred volumes to explain, and would even then 
leave the best unwritten. Talking in the grown-up sense is 
still superfluous to conversation, just as it is again dispensed 
with between lovers and others who have recovered the pure 
gold. Such communion is a cause of language, not a result 
of it. 

But there are other sources. The baby likes to lie and 
babble, to try all kinds of sounds ; he explores, for hours at 
a time, the resources of his vocal organs. Like many orators 
he loves simply to exercise his mouth and lungs. And at 
first he is much like Humpty Dumpty in his employment of 
the sounds produced. They mean for him whatever he 
chooses them to mean. A world of significance is packed 
into the few syllables of the first 'prentice speech. He will 
stand no nonsense in this matter. Whatever he may have 
upon his mind gets itself said, and understood too, though 
the vocables he utters have been innocent of such meaning 
hitherto. His orations satisfy the test of true eloquence in 
that they get results. Father, mother, all grown-ups within 
the wide sweep of his vocal radius, spring to execute these 
brief oracular commands. Then gradually there comes selec- 



78 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

tion among the sounds he makes. He finds that some of them, 
through association, contract definite relations to surround- 
ing objects or to reactions in his satelUtes. He tries them ; 
and lo ! things happen — and so there grows up for each a 
specific use, and there begins for him a mastery of man's 
most wonderful invention — a vocabulary. 

In the whole matter of language, whether in words or in 
the earlier form of gesture, imitation plays an important 
part. The child copies a gesture, a sound, a sneeze. His 
mother smiles and repeats.it. The child does it again, with 
a saucy look and intonation. It soon becomes a game, and 
he will get into gales of laughter over the variety of give and 
take that the one word or movement can convey. Then he 
imitates words and sentences by way of trying them on and 
seeing what will happen or to test some glimmering notion 
of their meaning. 

Always with children, I think, as with other people, the 
essential thing in conversation is not the conveying of in- 
formation but the establishing of mutual sympathy and the 
pleasure of mutual intercourse. That is why children, like 
their elders, ask questions when they care little about the 
answers, and when they cannot think of something new to 
say fall back on something not so new. Endless repetition 
of the same questions, jokes, even of the same grunts and 
squeals, attests this perennial desire. 

The child is thus a social being from the very start. His 
mind implies society as truly as his lungs imply air or his 
stomach food. Indeed the doctors say that the first use of 
his lungs is usually to cry, and that sometimes he will not 
even take his first breath until he needs it for that purpose 
— and crying is a purely social phenomenon, possible only 
where there are friends to listen and bring help. 

Our first practical conclusion is thus the ancient one that 



MOTHER PLAY 79 

the infant needs his mother not merely as a means of sus- 
tenance, but as a means of life. It is for this reason that 
modern charity workers will hardly separate a mother and 
child if they can possibly be kept together. And it is for 
this reason that Froebel, our greatest teacher, adopted the 
watchword: "Come, let us live with our children." Be 
with your own baby. Nurse him if you can, but in any 
case give him his bath and play with him. And see that his 
father plays with him. He may be a little scared at first, 
with the first baby, and act the bachelor uncle. But put 
the baby in his arms and leave them to fight it out. When 
you come to relieve him there will be little doubt about who 
won. 

Or if you have charge of children whose parents have 
died, or who must for any reason be separated from them, 
find others who will be parents in their place. The question 
is not of physical but of spiritual parenthood. Where the 
child has known and loved a mother, where his instinct has 
found and closed upon its counterpart, her loss will leave a 
sad void in his life. But fortunately the memory of very 
young children is seldom tenacious, and the empty place 
can be filled by one who has the qualities and the will to fill it. 
That such is the way of preserving both spiritual and physical 
life is the testimony of all competent observers; and such 
is now the practice of the majority of public and private 
charities. Where the institutional method is still followed, 
it is best in the form of detached cottages with a "father" 
and "mother" in each, presiding over a small "family" of 
children and providing them with something approaching 
as nearly as possible to home life. 

It is true that babies, like other folks, may have too much 
society. The modern idea of sometimes letting children 
alone — of not as a rule singing or rocking them to sleep, 



80 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of not insisting on their active and strained attention during 
every waking moment — is a vast boon to modern childhood, 
especially in this country, where the perpetually noticed, 
chirked, stimulated, and therefore abnormally "cute" infant 
— plied with candy and caresses the more relentlessly the 
more his wails proclaim his aching nerves — is father to the 
victim of Americanitis and other forms of nervous break- 
down. The baby, like the locomotive engineer, needs a few 
hours off. To stir the lamentably precocious child to a con- 
tinuous performance of pert question and retort for longer 
hours each day than any grown person could possibly endure 
is a form of child torture which should be forbidden by law 
and from which we are happily learning to refrain. 

Analogous to the need of being sometimes let alone is the 
child's frequent desire for a simplification of his world. 
It is said that human beings learn more in their first four 
years than in all the rest of life, and it is sometimes racking 
to the nerves even of these easy-going philosophers of the 
pre-peripatetic school, to be traveling at that rate all the 
time. Speed in the presentation of new subjects should 
sometimes be slackened to the world's pupil of two or three 
years old. A child often cries because life is getting too 
complicated. The world, he thinks, is too much with us : 
indeed, there is too much world. He feels with Emerson 
that things are of the snake. There are too many alterna- 
tives, too many demands upon his attention. He feels the 
cloisteral desire : he wants to go back home. 

There are many ways of simplifying life to a very small 
child — chief of which is to refrain from complicating it by 
too many toys, too many people, too much change of scene. 
Besides the need of quiet there is the need to organize, to get 
back where there are few objects and all of these familiar, to 
set one's house in order, unify one's world. The secret of 



MOTHER PLAY 81 

rest is order, a place for everything and everything in its 
place — nothing left flapping, nothing ambiguous, problem- 
atical. The mind instinctively insists on order as a pre- 
requisite of sanity. It holds at least to the organization 
of an inner circle of environment, a home field, a place 
to shoot from — what I imagine the psychologists call a 
solid apperceptive basis for further acquisition — a first 
immediate world that it can swing. 

A mechanical device that has proved itself useful in meeting 
the child's need of a simpler universe is the pen — not 
literary but restrictive — the small inclosing fence, about 
three and a half or four feet square and about two feet high, 
that can be set up in the nursery or parlor, on the piazza or 
out of doors. Whatever the explanation, the pen has been 
discovered, experimentally, to have a pacifying effect. A 
child put into it in full cry will often become immediately 
silent and happily absorbed in some familiar occupation with 
doll or blocks. In dealing with the fretful child, at least, the 
pen is mightier than the word. Incidentally it is an excellent 
place to learn to walk, the excursion's being short and the 
fence a good height to hold on by. 

Entire solitude is also good (or the practical solitude of 
being ignored will do at this earliest age), whether in the pen 
or otherwise, not only as a sedative but as an opportunity. 
Even the child's active life should not all be social. There 
should be a time when the swimmer is left wholly to the 
water, to let it hold him up. The significance of baptism 
is, I always think, surrender to the spirit — the river knows 
the way. At all events the child should have hours — long, 
uninterrupted hours — in which to find himself, to think his 
own thoughts, act out his own dramas, try his own experi- 
ments, hum those endless sagas by which the play of the 
soUtary child is invariably accompanied. There should 



82 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

be, even in earliest life, the habit of the up-against-it, of 
taking your universe straight, free from the disguising 
medium of adult interference. There is calmness, and 
there is strength, in such experience. It assures that there 
shall be immediate activity from the soul out — a core of 
original action proceeding from the individual's own genius — 
a germ of growing personality learning to take charge and to 
become the organizing and directive principle in all he does. 
The child's need of being sometimes unsocial, and even of 
having a special place for that congenial occupation, is 
continued in the grown person's need of alternation between 
society and solitude; the pen is repeated not only in the 
retreat or convent, but in the boudoir (place for sulks), 
schmoll-ivinkel, or grumble-corner, and English "den." 

But let us not balance one fault by another, as is too much 
our American tendency. It is well that the baby should have 
the habit of going to sleep by himself without rocking or 
singing or nocturnal joy rides in the paternal arms. But 
when, on finally going in to see what he is crying about, you 
have once found him with his head stuck between the bars 
of his crib, you may conclude that parents should not 
entirely abdicate even when their children are in bed. And 
so of the whole tendency to let alone. It does not follow 
because solitude is good that it is a panacea. Perpetual 
starvation is not the only escape from the perils of over- 
eating. Even social indigestion, though usuall}' due to too 
much society, may sometimes be the result of too little. 
The wild man of Borneo is not the only alternative to the 
overcivilized, nor the baby hermit to the baby vaudeville 
artist. 

Society and solitude, light and shade, activity and rest — 
such is the law of life for human beings from birth on. 
Though he cannot sit up and be pleasant twenty-four hours 



MOTHER PLAY 83 

a day, the child is none the less a social being and craves 
a social, not an exclusively vegetable, existence. 

Nor is there any talisman, as reactionary mothers some- 
times think, in stolid stupidity in the children's nurse. 
Mind is what the child's mind strives most to establish 
connection with, and the fitness of his attendants is not in- 
creased by the absence of that organ. There is such a thing 
as calm without stagnation. And to the child as a social 
creature a human though not a fussy environment, and 
especially a mother's understanding and reciprocation, is 
the first essential. 



CHAPTER XIV 

MANIPULATION 

If you will walkthrough the poorer quarters of any city and 
watch what the smaller children are doing, you will find that 
three out of every four who are doing anything definite at 
all — anything beyond running about and squealing or gazing 
solemnly at the passing show — have taken to themselves a 
broken bottle or tomato can and are filling it with dirt from 
the street, tipping it out on the sidewalk or the house steps, 
and then gathering it up again and repeating the process. 
If you come across a pile of sand that the masons have 
left, you will observe a similar phenomenon ; indeed, you will 
see the same sort of thing going on wherever there are 
children and material that they can dig or handle. We all 
know how children like the seashore. Some people think 
it is because of the blue ocean and the white sails and the 
rhythmic break of the waves. All this counts somewhat, 
especially the waves; but I doubt whether most children 
care chiefly for these things — at least until they are old 
enough to get their feet wet. What they like at the seashore 
is the sand. And they like it almost as well when it is 
dumped in the street or in a shadj^ corner of the school yard. 
At the seashore we substitute a tin pail for the tomato can ; 
we like it better and the children like it just as well. A 
collateral attraction of the curbstone or the house step is 
that it is the right height to sit on — for children, when you 
come to think of it, live in a world that is all tables and 

84 



MANIPULATION 85 

floors — what grown-up people call chairs being so high 
that your legs hang down as a fringe. 

What the child with the tomato can is doing is something 
that all children like to do. And what they like about it is 
manipulation, the use of the hands in the movement, control 
and fashioning of outward things. Perverse parents think 
that the reason children find the gutter so delightful is that 
they like dirt — especially if they have their good clothes on. 
But the children who play in this way are mostly too young 
to appreciate this particular attraction. It is not the 
dirtiness of the dirt they like; it is the fact that it can be 
handled, molded, or shoveled up and put into something. 
\Miat the child wants, and will find if he is not utterly starved 
of opportunity, is things to work on — something outside of 
himself that he can control. And in particular he wants 
material to handle : the hand is the invariable instrument 
of his desire. 

In this manipulating instinct we touch something not 
merely common to all children but fundamental in the pro- 
cess of their growth. I have spoken of the hand as the child's 
most intimate channel of affection. He finds his mother 
chiefly with his hands. They are the heart's live wire : 
it is preeminently through the touch of the fingers that the 
first great social relation is built up. And the hand remains 
through life the path of most instant and instinctive sym- 
pathy. What you " feel," what " touches " you, is our way of 
describing that which has really reached the heart. The 
hand is also the instrument of the child's instinct toward 
mastery of the outside world. If it reaches deeper than the 
eyes, and even the voice, as a bearer of the affections, it is 
still more the special organ of the will. The child makes 
instinctive requisition of its services for almost everything 
he wants to do. His active instincts find their natural 



86 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

issue in the hand ; his mind is focused on it and on what 
it does. To act is for him to handle, to manipulate. 

And as with action and emotion, so with knowledge also. 
To know is at first to touch, and for a long time to examine is 
to handle or pull apart. Through life the real is to mankind 
the tangible. The doubting Thomas may refuse the testi- 
mony of his eyes, but what his hand reports is final fact. 
To mankind as to the child the hand is at once the executive 
member and the means both of feeling and of knowing 
in the deepest sense. 

The reason is not difficult to find. Man as a race is largely 
the creature of this especial organ. It is peculiarly the 
human member. It was the cunning hand that produced 
the cunning mind by providing an instrument fine enough 
to require and to follow its discriminations. The hand was 
essential to the rise of man, as Anaxagoras is said so long ago 
to have maintained ; and it is still essential in the growth of 
every member of the race. As the cat conjugates " catch", so 
we, both as a race and as individuals, are creatures of the 
infinitely richer conjugation "to manipulate." Man and 
manual mean much the same. 

It is for this reason that manipulation bears so large a 
part in children's play. The child is built up around the 
hand ; it determines the form of almost all his early training, 
because such has also been the education of the race. We 
are all of us most literally hand-made. 

Grasping. The first notice the baby takes of his father is 
usually to seize him by the finger, or haply by the nose or 
the moustache. And, his grasp once established, he holds 
on like a young crab, until you wonder how you will ever get 
away. And in general the child's first use of the hand is in 
grasping with it as a whole. Whether this is because, after 
all these generations, his instinct harks back to the days of 



MANIPULATION 87 

sitting on one branch and holding on by another, I cannot say. 
At all events, the child's tendency to grasp and hold on, 
and his power of doing so, is remarkable. I know a 
father who lifted his baby by allowing him to grasp his 
thumbs, and kept up this practice so that the power never 
lapsed. 

But if a child's first grasping instinct is to hold himself to 
another object, this impulse is paralleled, and very early 
superseded in importance, by the desire to bring all sorts of 
objects to himself. The baby grasps at everything in sight. 
He not only wants the earth, but does not draw the line even 
at the moon in his prehensile aspirations. And whatever 
he gets hold of he puts, if possible, in his mouth, and then 
either sucks or swallows it or spits it out. He leads indeed, 
during the first few months, an emphatically hand-to- 
mouth existence. 
"^ The grasping, putting in the mouth, swallowing, and spit- 
ting out impulses form a series evidently aimed by nature to- 
ward the single end of getting food to the stomach. In time 
the hunting instinct is added at the beginning of what may 
be called the alimentary series. But to the child, meantime, 
each impulse is separate, and, while it lasts, sufficient in itself. 
While he grabs, grabbing is to him the be-all and the end-all ; 
it is only after he has grabbed successfully that the idea of 
putting things in his mouth occurs to him ; and only when 
it is in his mouth does the question of swallowing or spitting 
out arise.^ Nature's method of thus intrusting to her off- 
spring only so much of her purpose as he needs to know in 
order to take the next step along the way she has laid out 
for him is characteristic, and is of especial importance in the 
matter of those instincts that I have called the hungers. In 
sex relations especially, the end is not foreseen in the 
^ James's " Psychology," II, 404. 



88 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

beginning; each chapter of the love story leads on to the 
next, but the page is not turned until the reader gets 
to it. 

The putting-in-the-mouth impulse ceases after a time, 
being in the nature not of the great instincts that run through 
life and are necessary to its continuance or transmission, but 
of those, like the chicken's instinct to follow, which become 
precipitated in the more specialized form of habits and 
then are allowed to lapse. 

Wielding and Striking. Then comes the wielding instinct. 
There are some things too large to swallow and not pre- 
eminently satisfying to suck. If they are cool and smooth, 
and the child's gums are hot and troublesome, chewing may 
be their chosen destiny. But soon another use suggests 
itself. The child finds that it is good simply to take hold of 
things and shake them. He will seize and brandish any 
object that is at all suited to the purpose, — a spoon, stick, 
pencil, watch, or block, — and become much excited, and 
look quite fierce, in doing so. Afterwards, well satisfied with 
the results thus far obtained, — unless indeed he happens 
to bang himself in the head, an obstacle not as yet well 
charted in the mind and often getting in one's way, — he 
may find banging on the floor or on his tray, or pounding 
one block on another, desirable variations because of the 
good resistance encountered and the pleasing sounds pro- 
duced. Thus emerges the definite instinct to strike things 
with a stick or weapon of some sort, — an instinct which 
goes on developing far past this early stage and upon which 
a great group of games, including baseball, hockey, polo, 
golf, and tennis, is largely built. 

Weapons and Tools. Here, I take it, enveloped in these 
wielding and striking instincts, is the beginning of the 
use of tools. Man is the tool-bearing animal. I suppose the 



MANIPULATION 89 

most practically important event in the history of our race 
was when one monkey was chasing another and a branch 
broke off in the hand of the pursuer, and when the latter, 
instead of throwing it at his adversary, kept the broken-off 
piece in his hand and struck the other over the head with it. 
That was the origin of tools. From that day almost the 
chief importance of the hand has been, as before observed, 
in its adaptability as a socket for all kinds of implements. 
Other animals, as Darwin pointed out, are limited to one 
sort of working end. They have claws like the cat, a paddle 
like the beaver, a club like the horse, a pair of pincers like 
the wolf, and are limited by the nature of their executive 
member to one kind of business. Man alone can choose and 
fashion his own instruments and have at his arm's end a 
claw, a paddle, a club, a pair of pincers — or a pen, gun, 
paint brush, microscope, or tennis racket — or any other of 
the thousand tools and weapons he has learned to use. The 
hand, wonderful as are its direct uses, could never have done 
for us the half of what it has if it could not have thus ex- 
tended and transformed itself into whatever shape our desire 
or need prescribed. 

At the point of issue of man's instinctive aims there is 
thus placed not a single prescribed implement, but a blur — a 
composite photograph of many implements, including the 
shadow of possibilities not yet fulfilled. IMan's unique 
mental adaptability results, as we have said, from this 
physical variability of his executing member. 

It is largely to his tool-wielding power that man's su- 
premacy is due. If the two-handed but thumbless monkey, 
or the elephant with his single hand, have advanced somewhat 
on the same road, such advance is at once largely the cause 
and the result of their mental superiority to other animals. 

Man's tool- wielding inheritance is seen in the development 



90 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of every child. The tool grows almost visibly as the hand 
grows. The spoon, from being merely an object to be 
brandished, becomes a club or spade. And the child's 
mental focus shifts from the spoon itself, as a foreign object 
to be subdued, to the thing he is attacking with the spoon, 
now mastered and assimilated as an instrument. He thinks 
now not at his hand, but at the point of his spoon or stick. 
That has become his working end. 

The institution of private property rests first upon this 
tool-using instinct. A man owns at least his tools — that is 
to say, he will be protected by the community in his use and 
disposition of them, and will be permitted, within wide limits, 
to do with them as he chooses — for the same reason that he 
has the corresponding right and protection as to his bodily 
members. Property means that which in the nature of 
things belongs to you — what goes with you, makes you 
complete. Tools go with a man as a blade goes with a knife. 
Tools are a part of us; our personality extends to them as 
truly as to our hands and feet. The carpenter without his 
tools is maimed. The great musician is a pauper, mute and 
incapable, without his instrument. Tools are exempt from 
the right of creditors in bankruptcy as a part of the same 
reform which exempted the debtor's body. The laws of all 
the races of men, in asserting the workman's right to his 
tools, as to his body, against all the world, have but recog- 
nized what the child's instinct has all along affirmed. 

The right of the child himself to his playthings, to the ap- 
propriate objects to wield and shake and use, rests on the 
same basis, with only this difference that in his case it is not 
a question of cutting off a limb but of preventing it from ever 
being developed. The instinctive extension of the human 
body in tools is as much a part of growth as its extension in 
arms and legs. Tools are in the specifications; they are 



MANIPULATION 91 

among the members that the vital principle calls for and was 
wound up to use. 

Handling. Appearing about the same time as the wielding 
instinct or a little later, there is a general undifferentiated 
instinct to handle things — to take hold of them, move them 
about, feel what they are like. Children like to take sand 
or gravel in their hand and then tip it out and watch it fall, 
and will contentedly so occupy themselves for long periods. 
The manipulation we have noted in the child of the streets 
or of the sand pile is an instance of the same instinct. 

Control. Interwoven with the manipulating, grasping, 
and wielding instincts is that of possession and control. 
The receptacle habit, as illustrated in the use of the tin 
pail or tomato can, represents an impulse toward general 
dominion over outward things. When the child gets the 
sand into his pail he can take it where he chooses, do what he 
likes with it : it is in his power. I think the impulse is the 
same that made Mr. Morgan seek to control railroads and 
steamship lines. I doubt whether Mr. INIorgan had any 
special love for railroads. He was not a railroad fancier, 
did not collect them as another man collects coins or postage 
stamps. The motive in all such cases is the love of mastery, 
of getting hold of something you can swing — and the bigger 
the thing the more fun it is for you. The children that put 
sand into tin pails do not all turn out to be J. P. Morgans, 
but they are developing the J. P. Morgan element in their 
nature. 

The Hand as a Means of Thought. The classic object of 
the undifferentiated handling instinct is the ball, especially 
of worsted or of hollow rubber so as to be soft and squashy. 
A special fascination of the ball is that it moves after you let 
it go. The definite throwing instinct, a contributory source 
of so many ball games, also asserts itself in this connection. 



92 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The ball, furthermore, is mentally acceptable. Unlike the 
rest of this perplexing world, it is the same shape however 
you look at it. It is easy for the mind to grasp as well as 
for the hand. And it is, better at least than any other 
object, a convenient measure of all outward things. Apples, 
peaches, nuts, beads, buns, and marbles are just balls under 
different names. The world moreover is, pragmatically 
speaking, made up of things that you can roll and things 
you can't. The wheel or cylinder, which shares the rolling 
property, is after all a sort of sliced or stretched-out ball. 
A world of balls and not-balls, at all events, is easier to under- 
stand than one of hairpins and not-hairpins, or one built on 
any other practicable classification. The ball is the key of 
knowledge because it opens the most gates. Man is a ball 
player partly because he is a ball thinker also. 

This point of being mentally congenial is of importance 
from the very first in children's play. All activity has of 
course a mental element, just as all thinking is a kind of 
action. But besides having this necessary mental dimension 
in all his acts, the child has a special instinct both to measure 
and organize his world upon the one hand and to push for- 
ward its frontiers on the other — to explore and to assimilate- 
So when a child is tipping sand or gravel out of his hand 
you will often see him stop and examine some little object — 
a straw or stone. When he tips the dirt out of his tomato 
can onto the sidewalk he does so partly that he may study it. 
The sidewalk is his operating table, and you will see him 
separate out small pebbles or particles of sand and examine 
them with great attention. A child crawling about the floor 
will pick up a minute thread from the carpet and look at it 
a long time and with all his eyes. The value of having two 
hands and not merely one, like the elephant, is seen in his 
tearing, dissecting, examining, in this early pursuit of science. 



MANIPULATION 93 

In short the great instinct of curiosity asserts itself almost 
from the very first. The smallest child is scientist as well 
as man of action. The hand is servant of the mind as well 
as of the will ; or rather it is now his will toward the outside 
world to master it not only in the physical, but in the mental 
sense — to get the whole universe into his pail where he 
can swing it. 

So it is also with the kicking, "talking," waving his arms 
and trying to turn over in his crib — "experimentation," 
as such activities are sometimes called — which occupy much 
of the child's time, and have been so much described. His 
desire is not merely to conquer, but to explore. He attacks 
these outlying territories — his arms, legs, etc. — not merely 
in order to push his jurisdiction further, but to try out these 
members and see what service can be expected from them. 
And he could not tell you — any more than European diplo- 
mats would see fit to do so as to their dealings with the Dark 
Continent — where exploration leaves off and assimilation 
begins. 

In the child's exploring and assimilating (as Froebel so 
long ago discovered, and as students of the feeble-minded 
have reaffirmed) the hand plays a leading part. To know 
a thing is to get the "feel" and "hang" of it, to experience 
its shape and texture, its swing and balance — to find what 
it does to you and what you can do with it. All this is 
learned through grasping and wielding, and through the 
contact of the finger tips. The child likes touching, feeling, 
brandishing, all sorts of things. He likes edges, and sur- 
faces that are notably rough or smooth or soft or hard or 
slippery or sticky. I believe we all have a sneaking love 
for certain things, like rough clothes and sandpaper, because 
they give such robust report of themselves to the sense of 
touch. 



94 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

At all events the child — in spite of his germ-imbibing 
tendency to test also by touch of tongue — should be aided 
in his endeavor to grasp his world, by having good measure 
of it, in the form of a large number and variety of samples, 
put within his reach. 



CHAPTER XV 

CONSTRUCTION 

Some day when the child of this first age is playing with a 
handful of damp sand he squeezes it between his hands and 
then peeps in and sees that it has kept its shape ; and lo ! a 
new era in his life ! He has seen a material object marked 
with his image and superscription : he has stamped his 
thought upon a fragment of the external world. From 
that day on, making things — the molding and arranging of 
external objects so that they shall give him back his own 
thought, shall render to him what he had in mind and yet 
could not otherwise have truly known — will be for him an 
essential strand of life. The constructive instinct runs 
thenceforward through the whole of infancy, prescribing at 
each stage of the child's development some special exercise 
through which it grows and takes possession of him. He will 
not now be happy unless he can not only handle, wield, and 
strike, but make. 

In this first period the instinct takes a rudimentary form. 
The mud pie, the classic and aboriginal production, owes 
its fascination partly perhaps to its gooey consistency, 
partly to its satisfying response on being spatted on the 
top with spoon or digger, but chiefly I think to its supreme 
simplicity of construction. Sand operations are as yet mostly 
confined to simple piles or pyramids — also much spatted 
with spoon or shovel — and to digging holes, the latter 
operation being at first carried on with a forward and back 
rhythmic motion, both hands at once, like a woman washing 
clothes, and accompanied by a runic ballad of some sort. 

95 



96 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

There is I think a special digging instinct, acquired per- 
haps in long centuries of an ancestral diet of worms — to 
say nothing of clams and other burrowing game. Digging 
early develops, with a little suggestion, into the cooperative 
enterprise of tunneling from one hole to another — making 
"geranium drains," as a child I used to know called these 
subterranean passages — with much resultant thrill when the 
two hands meet below the earth. I remember my own first 
idea of "Sandy Claws" w^as thus obtained. 

Soon the children like to use molds — the tin pail, 
yielding its standard brown loaf, or shells or box covers, or 
more elaborate ones producing scalloped cakes. 

Every child loves blocks, and should have as many hundred 
of them as his parents can afford and their house will hold. 
And there should be a large supply on every playground. 
The brick-shaped block is best as most practical and least 
limited by its shape to any special form of edifice. " Building 
blocks" at this first age is not elaborate. It begins with 
simple repetition, placing one block on another and then 
another block on that, thus rearing a Tower of Babel — 
first form of architectural aspiration — as high as envious 
gods permit. Even before that the blocks are placed simply 
in a row along the floor. 

Do not get impatient with these slow and tentative be- 
ginnings, or force the constructive spirit beyond its natural 
gait. Should music supersede architecture, and the block 
that was the head of the corner be suddenly diverted in its 
use to pounding upon that which formed its base as an 
accompaniment to impromptu martial song, accept the 
change as natural and probably well timed. Babies are 
pretty good self-trainers. They usually know how long to 
stick at a thing, and if allowed to leave ofiF when they want 
to they do not get overtrained. 



CONSTRUCTION 97 

On the other hand children do not need to be constantly 
diverted as some parents seem to think. They should be 
given a chance to be absorbed — to be lost in their work, 
as they so easily and so fortunately become — carried by it, 
asleep in it, wrapped by the god in his own spirit and trans- 
ported to his very workshop, their mind and body taken 
up into the thing in hand until distinction ceases between 
the worker and his work. There is no work, and there is no 
rest, like that. Such absorption is, in most literal sense, the 
very making of the child, the actual process through which 
his soul gets born. 

Rules, it is true, are dangerous. Children can overdo, 
and must sometimes be taken shrieking from their work 
and put to bed. But do not dissipate. Do not be forever 
meddling, interfering, asking questions, showing them a 
better way. The soul also knows a little even if you are so 
wise ; and a child whose attention has been ruthlessly cut in 
two whenever he attempted to enlarge its span, who has been 
pulled up by the roots whenever he began to get a little into 
the song and swing of growth, has been spiritually maimed. 
Give the constructive power in your children scope and elbow 
room — the temple that it builds is invisible to any eyes but 
theirs ; if you blur and joggle their vision it is lost, and its 
work in them will remain forever unaccomplished. 

In all the material the child will now or later learn to use — 
sand, blocks, clay, cloth, beads, paper, wood, or raffia — 
adaptability is the main consideration. It must be plastic 
to his hand and mind. Not something you have shaped for 
him, but something he can shape for himself, is what he wants. 

Sand is the classic material of childhood because it is the 
least committed. It is the open-minded substance, to which 
one shape is as welcome as another, that will enter with equal 
geniality into any form. Sand seems to be the correlative of 



98 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

children's hands. They must have grown in it originally; 
and they seem to remember the long amphibious ages when 
our sea-born ancestors first made good their footing on the 
beach, and to recognize their ancient playmate. Sand is 
the silent comrade who understands, to whom children confide 
their notions of how the universe should be arranged. There 
should be sand, a little damped so as to hold its shape, for 
every child to use : a sand pile in the back yard, a sand box 
or sand table in the playground, with a cover folded back or 
other good place for the young Phidias to fashion and set 
forth his wares. 

Here, in this manual form, the great creative impulse 
branches off — a little bud at first, but destined to carry a 
main interest of human life. The mud pie contains all the 
constructive works of man. From bandboxes to religious 
systems the things men make, the images and institutions 
they produce, lie folded in this form of play. Married to 
rhythm, the building instinct is parent of all the arts. Men 
build in music, in words and laws and institutions. What- 
ever is molded or put together in expression of a purpose 
is of this origin. Other instincts may bear their part, 
prescribing the purpose of the special edifice. But wherever 
thoughts or material things are put together to form' a whole, 
there man the artificer is at work. 

The building instinct is essential in all science. To think 
at all is to think constructively. To pass beyond an un- 
conscious series of sensations is to form, build up, conceptions 
out of the raw material of thought. And thought is fruitful 
in proportion as the ideal structure produced is large and 
firmly knit. The productive thinker must be able, by an 
expansion of the imagination, as Professor Keyser of Colum- 
bia has said, to comprehend whole systems of ideas within a 
single vision, and to hold them fast — as it were by the hair 



CONSTRUCTION 99 

of the head — while he subjects them to a unifying intuition 
and tests his intuition by their acceptance of it ; as though a 
man with a hundred hands were to build an arch of as many 
blocks by putting them all into their place at once. Con- 
sider the great hj^jothesis of Darwin — regiments of facts, 
marshaled in brigades and columns, in whole army corps, 
converging under one master mind upon a single point. 
There is no more definitely building operation, nor any con- 
struction on a vaster scale, than is found in the most abstract 
scientific work. 

Constructive power is called for even where there seems 
at first sight no originality required, as in singing or reciting, 
even in dancing, because one must first project the verse or 
movement in one's mind in order to produce it. You cannot 
even listen intelligently without constructing the music or 
the argument in your own mind. As Emerson said, it takes 
two to tell the truth, one to speak and one to hear. The 
hearer's task, to be sure, is easier because the span of his 
attention need not be so great, and because he has only to 
build, not to invent. Constructive power, in short, is 
necessary to all action, including thought. To make is 
in most languages the same verb as to do. Man is a 
maker if he acts at all, and without action he becomes 
extinct. 

But whatever the later incarnations of the creative instinct, 
however wide its subsequent variety of form, its first un- 
folding, the germ of whatever power it may afterwards attain, 
is in the child's instinctive molding with his hands. Small 
children will not write books or poetry or construct scientific 
h>7)otheses. It is true they will invent games and dances 
and compose sagas of a primitive sort ; but the main stress of 
their creative impulse is upon manual production. To con- 
struct is in these first years to make things with one's hands. 



100 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

And construction in this first, manual, form must be 
allowed its scope if the full power is ever to be born. The 
mental process in all construction is the same. The power to 
imagine the finished structure before you start, to hold its 
image in your mind as you grope about for the methods and 
material necessary to its execution : these are the powers 
needed in all constructive work, and these are the powers 
exercised in a child's instinctive building with his hands. 
As river systems are said to grow backward from their 
mouth, so the creative impulse works inward from this first 
form of utterance until it permeates the entire nature and 
the child becomes a maker throughout — his whole being is 
polarized toward this end. The instinct thus generalized 
finds many issues, though I think it always retains a manual 
bias. But it will never reach its full growth, will never soak 
into the system with the eSicient power it should possess, 
except as it finds its first outlet in the primal and instinctive 
form. Once a builder, the child may build in many ways 
and to a wide variety of ends, but the power must get its 
first growth in the form that nature has prescribed. 

And as of the method, so also of the period of growth. 
The time to receive an inspiration is when it comes. An 
instinct must be utilized while it is there, and while the 
child's nature is plastic to its impress. The chicken will not 
learn to follow after the days of its instinctive following are 
passed. In the child's impulse to make things during these 
early years the creative instinct is offering its gifts. This is 
the time if ever to receive them ; the opportunity will never 
be so good again. Now is the budding-off time of this 
great instinct. A check at this stage will stunt its growth 
and permanently lessen its fertility. It is the offer of the 
sibylline books. Each year there are fewer to be purchased 
and at a higher price. 



CONSTRUCTION 101 

Such is the place In life of the constructive instinct. 
Each of these great constituent impulses seems when one is 
studying it to be almost the whole of life, the center around 
which all the rest revolves. And indeed these elemental 
forces of man's nature do each permeate the whole of him. 
They are not divided in their jurisdictions, but, like the colors 
of the spectrum, are each present throughout. Of the 
creative impulse it may be said that it is the captain of the 
instincts, the one by which the rest are marshaled in the 
ordering of our active life. It is true it is not the monarch ; 
sovereignty resides in the belonging instinct or thereabouts ; 
but it is his loyal and efficient aide. When your child be- 
comes absorbed in the shaping of his sand house he does so in 
obedience to an instinct whose importance justifies him. 
The great Sculptor, through it, is shaping him. 



CHAPTER XVI 

CREEPING, WALKING, AND BALANCING 

The desire for locomotion appears long before the child 
learns to walk, usually unaccompanied by any conclusive 
suggestion as to how the thing is to be accomplished. It is 
true that many children crawl on their hands and knees 
after the manner of the picture books, and these may be 
following some faint suggestion from a quadrupedal past; 
but the majority, at least of those whom I have observed, 
do not adopt that method. Some jump like a rabbit — both 
hands first and then the legs brought up under, both at once ; 
one child, whose arms were long enough to raise her off 
the floor in a sitting posture, used them like a pair of crutches 
and swung along feet foremost with great speed; one I 
have known to walk a good deal of the time like a young bear, 
really on all fours, using her feet instead of her knees. The 
majority, or at least a plurality I think, adopt a one-sided, 
crablike system, one leg being tucked underneath and the 
other used as a sort of side wheel or pushing pole, while 
the arms are either used together or else the arm on the 
same side as the leg that is tucked in gets the weight, 
while the other is flourished as a balancing rod. 

But the important factor is not method, but desire, and 
locomotion precedes the development even of the crude 
methods above described. The first journe}' is accomplished 
by means even more primitive. A child about nine months 
old drops a ball and it rolls out of reach. He wants it ; and 
it appears perfectly natural to him, as it would not have done 

102 



CREEPING, WALKING, AND BALANCING 103 

a few months before, that he should try to get it, only he has 
not the slightest idea how to go to work. Generally he gets 
there by sheer force of desire assisted by accident. He 
almost invariably turns round a number of times, usually 
forgets once or twice what lie was trying to do, falls over 
once on the back of his head, gets his arm caught under him 
and squeals and groans over getting it out, and at last finds 
himself suddenly alongside of the ball but without the faint- 
est idea of how he got there. As the days go by, the desire 
for locomotion and his consciousness of its possibility 
both become stronger. But the method not being even yet 
made clear by any subsidiary instinct, he is put to great 
exertion both of mind and body to reach the desired result, 
until he finally hits upon some solution which he has practi- 
cally invented for himself His wish seems almost to pull him 
along, by its very intensity, without any definite means of 
operation. His only thought is to get there, and the mind 
somehow, anyhow, draws his body after it across the floor. 
The discovery of his first method of locomotion by each 
individual child is, like all other great discoveries, a solution 
arising out of a deep-felt need. Columbus discovered 
America, and Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of 
Good Hope about the same time, because Europe wanted to 
trade with India ; while the high tariff at Suez, the marauding 
tribes of Asia INIinor, and her own robber barons had made 
the existing routes too expensive. Europe found new ways 
around the world because she had to ; just as, three and a 
half centuries later, canals were dug, and finally railroads 
evolved, because mechanical inventions had carried manu- 
factures off to lonely spots possessing water power, far from 
their natural markets. In the voyage of Columbus Europa 
made the discovery of how to creep toward her desired 
rattle. 



104 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Walking, when it comes, seems to result from the con- 
bining of two strands, — the instinct of locomotion as 
above described, and that of simply kicking and pushing with 
the legs plus a specific walking instinct. 

From a very early age the baby likes to kick, at first with 
both feet at once and then with them sometimes separately. 
Very early he likes to press wuth his feet against something 
and push it away from him, — for instance his mother's 
hand, — a predilection in which Froebel finds a general 
desire to encounter and overcome resistance. Then he likes 
to be held so that he can press his feet against the floor and 
feel his weight on them ; then to pull himself up by a chair 
or his mother's dress, stand and look about him with an 
air of triumph, frequently cut short by a subsidence so 
sudden as to suggest a disappearing gun, — a catastrophe 
which he will learn to take as a great joke if that view rather 
than the tragic one is suggested to him by the attitude of 
his elders. 

Another set of exercises, whether preparatory to walking 
or not I cannot say, but of which the child is certainly very 
fond, — perhaps more calculated to develop the muscles 
of the trunk than those of the legs, — consists of lying on his 
back in an Abraham Lincoln attitude, with his legs sticking 
straight up in the air, either contentedly manipulating his 
toes with an expression of contemplative interest or merely 
apostrophizing the ceiling. Opening and shutting like a 
jackknife, like the baby in Alice, to the great discomfiture 
of inexperienced male nurses, is another favorite amusement 
in the pre-walking stage. 

When the instincts of locomotion, kicking, and walking 
proper combine, and actual walking begins to result there- 
from, the pen above mentioned, with its fence of con- 
venient height and its rungs to pull one's self up by, is 



CREEPING, WALKING, AND BALANCING 105 

much appreciated. Then follow short trips from one haven 
of extended arms to another, the peril of the passage affording 
just cause for mirth at its successful termination. Next 
come voyages of discovery to the distant coast of the low- 
lying sofa, mad escapades to the far corner of the room, 
breaking away from one's guardians on the beach and 
making for the distant ocean — with some looking backward, 
however, to make sure that timely pursuit shall keep the 
delicious terror of the adventure within tolerable bounds. 

And so at last Nature's object is accomplished and her 
favorite production stands and moves erect. The feat is 
indeed an extraordinary one. How any creature ever 
learned to perform it is almost as great a marvel as how he 
ever came to see. 

And while he is in the balancing business the child takes 
occasion to carry his proficiency much further than merely 
walking on the level floor. He likes to walk along a board 
laid on the ground, as it is still quite a feat to walk such a 
strait and narrow path. When he is a little more advanced 
he likes to get up on the sofa, and rejoices in its lively and 
disconcerting response to his motions and in the way it 
pushes his feet up after him when he steps. He stands in 
the rocking-chair or on a wobbly board or box, and tries how 
fast he can make it vibrate before catastrophe ensues. 
Children when they have just learned to walk like running 
down a bank or slanting board, their feet going, apparently 
on their own responsibility, out into space before them as they 
descend. And they will frequently return to this adventure 
even when disaster has accompanied a first experiment. I 
have seen a small boy who had lately learned to walk stand 
up on a toboggan and in that position slide down a slope 
where many grown people would have found some difficulty. 
There should be banks or slanting boards, or something else 



106 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of the cellar door variety, to run down in this manner, as 
well as to roll or slide on, in every playground to which small 
children are invited. 

I suppose the child in all these balancing feats is training 
not only his legs and other necessary muscles but his middle 
ear — which is, as I understand, the organ provided to tell 
him which side up he is, and how much, how fast, and in what 
direction he is declining from the vertical. 

As soon as the child can walk he wants to run. From that 
moment locomotion develops on the two lines of the running, 
chasing, fighting games on the one hand ; and of feats of 
balance and locomotion on the other, such as balancing on one 
leg, walking along the tops of fences or on railroad tracks, 
running across the rocks, skating, dancing, surf-running on 
a board. But of the two tendencies the more purposeful 
one, toward the chasing and fighting games, is by far the 
stronger. 



BOOK III. THE DRAMATIC AGE 
CHAPTER XVII 

IMPERSONATION 

As everybody knows, the play of small children — say from 
two and a half years old to six or thereabouts — is largely in 
the form of make-believe. They play doll and horse and 
soldier; sand at their touch turns into pies and houses; 
blocks become cows and schooners and railroad trains. 
If 3'ou listen to a child busy over his fortification against the 
waves you may hear him humming to himself a sort of chant ; 
and this epic, often inaudible, is in many children an 
accompaniment to almost everything they do. Much of 
the child's life at this age consists of impersonation, directly 
or through playthings to which the various parts are assigned, 
and there is no understanding him without knowing what 
this sort of drama means. 

The dramatic impulse is in the first place not an impulse 
to show off ; that belongs to a later, self-conscious, period, 
while a characteristic mark of the age that we are consider- 
ing is its lack of consciousness. In truth the reason why 
the first two periods of childhood are so little understood by 
grown people is that they are the ones they have forgotten — 
or rather that they never knew — for they were unconscious 
when they passed through them. They are like the parts of 
the country one went by in the sleeping car. Where patches 
of memory appear — the light of self-consciousness ilium inat- 

107 



108 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

ing a hilltop here and there — such patches, though in the 
midst of the dramatic age, do not belong to it but are out- 
posts of a later dispensation. 

Nor is the impulse we are considering toward dramatics in 
the grown-up sense : toward representing to other people 
what is passing in the actor's mind. It is, rather, the con- 
verse of this, being the method whereby children make 
clear to themselves what they suppose to be in the minds of 
other people and of other things, or what is dimly passing 
in their own. 

Essentially the dramatic impulse in children's play is the 
impulse to understand their world. It is the principal form 
in which the great human instinct of curiosity appears at this 
period of growth. And the mind's first ordered world is 
built of other minds. The attraction of life for life is the 
strongest influence in determining the child's objects of 
attention. Not stationary things but things that move, 
not dead things but things that live, have fascination for 
him. It is living things that are for him the normal, the 
matter-of-course, around which his world is organized, by 
which it is measured and understood ; and he does not easily 
believe in departures from the normal type. Everything 
for him is alive until the contrary is proved. His sympathetic 
understanding goes out as readily to the wind, the waves, 
the fire engine, as to the dog or kitten. So also the interesting 
thing about any object is its life. To know what it is like 
inside, what it is for itself and when it is at home, how its 
personality feels when you are it, — is the child's great 
desire. The life in all things is the legitimate object of in- 
vestigation for a rising young scientist of going-on-four- 
y ears-old. 

The object of curiosity during this dramatic, animistic 
age is inevitably the world of wholes, of individuals. Not 



IMPERSONATION lOd 

the outline but the mass, not the details but the total effect — 
still more the essence, the song of the thing — is what is 
sought. We shall come to edges and differences later on. 
First is to know you have a father, mother, doll, hobbyhorse, 
etc., and what in the main, and for themselves, these are. 
To know in this way is an act of faith. It is to imagine, 
project the reality, and to stake your efforts on its being 
as you dare to think. It is an act of sympathy. It is by 
hospitality of mind, by comradeship, by a bonhomie as 
yet wholly trustful and unchilled, not only toward his fellow 
humans but toward birds and beasts and bits of wood or 
stone, toward grass and trees and brooks and furniture, 
that the child conquers the secrets of the physical world as 
well as the hearts of those about him. 

The child's method of study is by impersonation, by 
putting himself inside the thing he wants to know, being it, 
and seeing how it feels. What he is doing when he acts 
mother, horse, engine, blacksmith, bear, is finding out by 
actual experience what these most interesting playmates 
really are. He learns the main characters in the drama in 
which he has been cast by assuming each in turn. Whatever 
personality interests him into that he transmigrates and 
shares the exhilaration of its deeds. Later he will study 
practicalities, will criticize, perceive methods and limitations. 
Now his instinct is to grasp the whole, to enter by one sheer 
leap of intuition into the heart of the object of his study and 
act out from that. His is the sort of power one gets under 
the influence of music in later life, that of making a bold 
and glorious assumption with a perfect disregard of diffi- 
culties and details. He can still see the forest wholly un- 
troubled by the trees. The child instinctively, and upon 
the most heterogeneous problems, adopts the mathemati- 



no PLAY IN EDUCATION 

cian's device of assuming that this thing is so and so and 
seeing how the supposition works — only his assumptions 
are not abstract but most concrete and living things. 

The child's active bodily presentation of his experience, 
the necessity he is under of acting out in the flesh his in- 
tuitions of the inner nature of his world, is due to the fact 
that imagination is as yet too weak to stand alone. He 
does not fully possess his mental image until he has given 
it a bodily form. He is above all under the necessity of 
personally partaking of the action of the thing he studies 
because only so can he feel the working of the active prin- 
ciple in which its essence is contained. He acts out in order 
to possess. 

Of course the child does not know that he is studying. He 
does not say, " Now I am a young man starting out in life 
and the first thing is to lay a broad foundation of general 
ideas," and then decide that a study of conscious beings 
furnishes the most valuable curriculum. He does not even 
say "I'll be Mamma and find out what she's like," but 
just "I'll be Mamma." Mothers, schooners, fire engines, 
and the like are simply too fascinating to resist — who would 
not embark in such a personality if a ticket were offered 
him ? The thing, whatever its explanation to us grown-ups, 
comes to him simply in the chunk — all one undifferentiated 
impulse. As the egg is to the hen, according to James, the 
never-too-much-to-be-sat-upon object, so the mother is to 
the child the never-too-much-to-be-impersonated phenom- 
enon. In both cases Nature has her own end in view, but 
has intrusted to her offspring only as much of the secret 
as was necessary to make him serve that end. 

I believe, however, that the child's impersonating im- 
pulse, though it comes to him all one, partakes of the nature 



IMi^ERSONATION 111 

of the great instinct of curiosity of which it is a phase — 
that in the impulse to impersonate, as in the exploring, 
investigating, classifying impulses that will command him 
later on, there is the unconscious desire to master, to take 
hold of his world and assimilate it to his mind and use. 
He desires to approach, to experience, these fascinating 
personalities in order that he may make them his. The 
successive studying impulses are the branches of one tree 

— of the mind as Knower reaching out into its world — 
and the whole stem vibrates to their activity and growth. 

The impersonating impulse is, I suppose, partly a phase 
of the imitative instinct that we hear so much about. But 
it is imitative in a very special sense. Not the outer act 
but the inner spirit is what the child desires to represent, 
or rather to possess. He imitates, indeed, all kinds of 
actions — prances like a horse, creeps like a kitten, says 
bow wow like a dog. And it is true that the fascination is 
partly in the act itself — it must be very nice to go like that. 
But it is never a dry imitation. It is not like the pho- 
nographic reproduction of a parrot, to whom "damn," 
"good-by," and the squealing of a much-moved sofa are 
equally significant. .Never the bare act but always the act 
as a vehicle of life is what attracts him, — the prancing soul, 
the sinuous personality, the dog behind the bark. 

In getting at the heart of personality the sharing of its 
action is, indeed, the important method. The best way to 
be anybody — to get the feel of hhn as he is from the inside 

— is to act out his character and function. Even in his 
names for things a child shows insight of this principle in 
the importance he assigns the verb when he calls the cow 
the moo, the dog the bow wow, the sheep the baa. If one 
could say in a single word what so complex and pervasive 
a person as a mother does, that word would also be her 



112 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

name. Thus the child will reproduce many actions of his 
original ; his whole performance may be so composed. But 
as Shakespeare wrote his Julius Caesar not from Plutarch 
but from the Rome which his reading of Plutarch enabled 
him to construct — as all true artists paint not from the 
model but from the mental image to which their model 
helps them — so the child's reproduction is never merely 
of actions seen, but always of actions as expressive of the 
character he feels in them. Not going through the motions 
but getting inside the person, not being like a steam engine, 
still less looking like one, but actually being a steam engine, 
partaking of its experience, is where the fun comes in. 

As it is the spirit not the form that governs impersonating 
play, much laxity in method is to be observed. With very 
small children almost any sort of action may seem near 
enough the original for the purposes of a workaday world. 
I heard a boy three and a half years old going " baa, baa " 
in a plaintive tone of voice. "Hullo," I said: *'is that a 
sheep?" He answered : " Fse not a sheep ; I'm a horsie." 
Even one's "bow wow" is likely to become conventional 
rather than realistic. On the other hand, fierceness in 
driving away wolves and faithfulness to one's master, as 
more expressive of the soul, are usually of a high order. 

Because of this superiority of spirit over form, costume 
is always of minor interest. You are a Shakespeare rather 
than a Scott in your presentation. It is the action, not the 
dress, that counts. As horse, accordingly, you prance, 
curvette, champ the bit; dark lightning issues from your 
rolling eye, fire from your distended nostril. But as for 
bridle, saddle, mane, tail, and iron shoes — well, there may 
be a visit to the blacksmith because of the scope afforded 
for character development. That standing with conscious 
self-restraint, pawing, arching the neck, quivering with 



IMPERSONATION 113 

desire to be off, is a familiar but always valuable experience. 
But manes and tails and things, real ones, why anybody 
who is half a horse already has these in his soul, whenever 
in the tossing of the head or in stamping to keep off a fly 
the spirit calls for them; their physical presentment is a 
matter of negligible importance. 

Even when, in any particular case, there is insistence 
upon some special mark of outward resemblance — a fur 
rug for a skin or a pair of pasteboard wings — this is often 
because such things have become s^nnbolical, just as certain 
scenery at the Theatre Fran9ais has come to represent 
"palace" or "drawing-room" without the necessity of any 
traceable resemblance to the places typified. I knew, for 
instance, a boy of three who could become "Mr. McGregor," 
whose mission in life it was to chase "Peter Rabbit," only 
when he glared out from the inverted waste-paper basket 
as through the bars of a helmet, although Mr. McGregor, 
the original of the part, wears only a skull cap. Not looking 
like Mr. McGregor but acting as that hero was the thing; 
you are doing this for your own satisfaction, not to please 
the audience. Outward resemblance may indeed be a help 
if it heightens the inward sense of impersonation, and you 
will not scorn to adopt such insignia, for instance a flag or 
soldier cap, as may prove a means of grace in this respect. 
A pair of reins to be driven by have a practical as well as a 
suggestive value, helping in the actual mechanics of the part. 
But as a rule a robust imagination scorns all merely visual 
accessories, while outward traits, apart from their suggestive 
value, are of no interest or importance. 

What is true of literalness in your own personal costume 
also applies to your "support." Toys, things of convenient 
size and shape to play with, are indeed essential. But it is 
what you can do with or imagine about them, not what 



114 PLAY IN EDUeATION 

they themselves can do, that is important. Toys, not fiz- 
jigs : it is the child's own achievement, not that of the 
clever man who made the toy, that counts. A toy, at this 
age, is chiefly a peg to hang imagination on. It is the child's 
alter ego, to whom he assigns the parts that he cannot con- 
veniently assume himself. And literal resemblance to their 
originals is the last thing he requires in his subordinates. 
An oblong block will be successively a cow, a sofa, and a 
railway train, and will discharge each part with perfect 
satisfaction to its impresario. Too much realism is indeed 
a disadvantage. If the block had actually been in the 
likeness of a cow, a sofa, or a railroad train, it would have 
presented difficulties — not indeed insuperable, but a little 
daunting at the outset — in its assignment to the other 
roles. So a horse with real hair and shining harness is a 
good horse if the harness is really workable and does not 
break too soon; and one still gratefully remembers that 
smell of sticky paint that characterized him. But such a 
horse may be, by the very perfection of his adaptation to a 
special service, disqualified from interpreting the finer 
spirit, the more universal essence, of horsehood in its deeper 
sense. A stick or a cane is really more to the purpose — 
something that can accompany you on your wildest flights 
— your Pegasus, Bucephalus, Rosinanti, as occasion calls — • 
not a creature whose understanding of the business is con- 
fined to the pulling of a cart. The hobbyhorse, of all the 
aspirants in this especial line, best combines suggestion with 
adaptability — perhaps he owes his prominent position in 
the writings of our greatest dramatist to fond recollection 
of his companionship in early flights. And then a great 
thing about the hobbyhorse is that if his head comes off 
it is very little matter : the idea of the head survives upon 
the resulting stick. Better, at all events, a stick without a 



IMPERSONATION 115 

head than a head without a stick. One of the most petted 
quadrupeds I have known consisted, to the prosaic eye, of 
half a barrel hoop — and I doubt whether its suggestion of 
a bucking broncho was even perceived by its fond owner. 

So also a doll that could dance the polka and whistle 
God Save the King might be a very good doll for once — 
perhaps for fifteen minutes on Christmas morning — but 
after the first fascination of passive enjoyment had passed 
away she would be fit only for the rag bag or to serve as the 
subject of an autopsy. A clothespin with a rag tied round 
it more nearly answers the requirements because, like the 
American girl, she is not committed to one part in life but 
is capable of fulfilling any position to which she may be 
called : mother, duchess, cook or fairy princess, it is all 
one to her ; and thus she holds her own in a world in which 
one doll in her time plays many parts — and has got to or 
lose her job. 

It is true nevertheless that verisimilitude, especially if 
it has also a practical working value, may, as time goes on, 
become acceptable. There comes an age when real hair 
that can be brushed, clothes that button and can be taken 
off, eyes that shut when their possessor is put to bed, are 
felt to be an advantage rather than a drawback. It is 
interesting to note that the Father of his Country was so 
good a father to the little Custises that in the first invoice 
of goods to be shipped to him after his marriage he included, 
besides books and other toys, "a fashionable dressed baby 
to cost ten shillings." A progressive discrimination that 
begins by conceding a basic difference between cows and 
sofas and railroad trains, and finally extends even to recog- 
nizing differentiation of function among dolls, permits, or 
may even require, such accessories. And then the same 
imagination that could have supplied the special adaptation 



116 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

when absent can abolish it when it is not wanted. Elabora- 
tion, furthermore, is tolerable if it is such as to be always 
in character. A baa lamb that will squeak when pressed 
to do so, or a pig that can be brought to utter a plaintive 
howl when he expires, clearly have their place in a rich 
environment. 

While literal resemblances are usually of little moment 
and are often detrimental, practical workaday availability 
will always have its value. I have known an oar blade 
serve as a horse for a time, in spite of the wide gait which 
it necessitated, but it was soon supplanted by a plain stick 
because the latter was practically the better mount. So 
I have known a piece of kindling to serve as a doll, but I 
have not heard of chairs or heavy pieces of stone being 
employed in that capacity. 

And the essential function will usually be respected. A 
boy of three and a half turns up caressing about 30 inches 
of garden hose. To him his parent : " What's that you have 
got?" The boy: "Why, that's my skunk. He will squirt 
you if you don't look out." 

I suppose, though I have no figures to prove it, that the 
practice of impersonating during these three impressionable 
years, for many of the waking hours of every day, creates 
a power to impersonate, — a power, that is to say, to put 
yourself in another person's place, and to do this with some- 
thing of the whole-souled manner of the play through which 
the power was formed. I believe that the impersonating 
impulse bequeaths sympathetic insight — the power to see 
people as they really are, the intuitive sjTnpathy that sees 
with another's eyes, feels with his nerves, that can realize 
him not merely as a phenomenon of sense — a thing, an 
obstacle, a convenience — but also as a feeling, struggling 



IMPERSONATION 117 

human being, embodying a purpose, commanded by ideals, 
subject to despair and hope. 

I believe that the practice of impersonating inanimate 
things during the dramatic age develops a power to imper- 
sonate them, to see these also from the inside — to get the 
feel of them, to imagine how it must be to fall like a stone, 
fly like a bird, sail like a boat, tower and break like a big 
wave — the power to sympathize with matter, to speak its 
language, predict what it will do. And this sort of sym- 
pathy with material things is essential to any understanding 
of them. Observation can check off and verify — even 
passive, photographic observation. It can come in after- 
wards and criticize, show where imagination was right 
or wrong ; it can never construct, foresee, or understand. 
No man is a real chemist, or scientist of any sort, who is 
not also the poet of his science, who cannot feel the longing 
of the substance for its natural compound, the dread potency 
of unstable chemical combinations, the triumphant logic of 
the arch, the swing and fierceness of the flying train. One 
man's hand upon the tiller of a boat is as different from 
another's as upon the rein of a horse, the life of a woman, 
the leadership of a political party. One perhaps knows all 
that can be told, all that was ever written on the subject 
or ever will be, but he cannot get the speed out of his own 
yacht. The other feels the boat as a living thing, humors 
her over the waves when she is fractious, sustains her cour- 
age in a head sea. So one man feels how^ the bridge arches 
its back against the load; the other only knows about it 
from the book. The one can compose in structure ; the 
other is confined to repetition. No two vessels, bridges, 
steam engines, are alike ; sense as well as science is required 
to deal with them. And often science, in emergencies, 
must give way to insight : while you are looking up the rule 



118 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the vessel swamps. Only through imagination can you pro- 
ject physical law into new combinations, make new general- 
izations, solve problems, invent. 

The power to sympathize with matter is necessary even 
to correct description of its ways. Kipling has such sym- 
pathy in a remarkable degree. As some one has said of 
him, he is not only a man among men but a piston rod among 
piston rods. He can talk the language not only of the 
animals, but of wood or ice or iron, and can tell convincingly 
of things he never saw. His icebergs may do things no ice- 
berg ever did ; they may be eccentric in their actions ; but 
they will never be out of character. His Captain Troop 
looks like a codfish when he is thinking where to sail next 
simply because he is a codfish at the moment. That is 
Kipling's method too, and that of every writer who is not a 
phonograph. 

Observation reports a sequence of sensations but tells us 
nothing of a cause. It can verify or reject hypotheses, but 
without imagination there are no hypotheses even to reject. 
You cannot criticize things into existence nor refine upon 
ideas until you have them. To suppose a cause, to form hy- 
potheses, to foresee at all, is wholly the province of imagina- 
tion ; and the truth of our imagining depends on insight — 
on power to be yourself the thing imagined and feel how it 
will act. First catch your hare. Imagination is the only 
net in which a world of cause and process and action can be 
caught. And imagination gets its growth in the dramatic 
play. 

I have said that the child in his impersonation is not 
consciously studying: his impulse is simply to be the 
thing that interests him. The whole process is more un- 
conscious than it is possible for grown people to imagine. 



IMPERSONATION 119 

To be, to act, and to know are not yet distinct. The 
child's condition is like that of a person in a dream, who as 
soon as he gets interested in any character is apt suddenly to 
find that he is that character himself. What interests the 
child he acts, and lo he is ! 

But as between knowing and being, though these are 
still all one to the child, the accent varies. In some of his 
impersonation there is a larger element of curiosity, in 
some of it more of the desire to become — a difference 
which appears for instance in the varying permanence 
of his several roles. A child is a horse and buggy possibly 
for an afternoon ; but he will be his' favorite hero — sailor, 
lamplighter, or Dr. Torrey — for weeks together — and 
woe to nurse or parent who addresses him out of charac- 
ter! Intimacy and permanence are greatest as we ap- 
proach a personal ideal, until in these more serious 
impersonations there finally appears the first glimmering of 
a conscious desire for life in the spiritual sense. Froebel's 
game of the Knights, the group of ideal heroes, inviting 
the child into their fellowship, is a stroke of genius in its 
successful rendering of this highest note in the impersona- 
tion of the dramatic age. 

All the world's a stage to children at this period. But the 
home has the best scenario and stage properties. You can 
there be Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Jones or a fire engine 
horse with less danger of Philistine interruption than on the 
playground. The playground can, however, by suggestion, 
and by taking serious things seriously (refraining, for in- 
stance, from asking George Washington half across the 
Delaware when his mother is coming for him) encourage 
this most important form of play, — an encouragement 
especially needed when imagination has been stunted by a 



120 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

home suffering from that form of efficiency mania that 
would sacrifice a mind's development for the sake of a little 
precocious knowledge of the grown-up world. 

At all events, wherever he is, whether at home or in 
school or on the playground, whoever has charge of the 
child should remember that impersonation is during this 
period a chief and necessary means of growth. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 

As to the subject of impersonation, directly or by proxy, 
the dramatic impulse is very catholic. It colors almost 
every occupation of children during the time of its ascen- 
dency. Anything they make is a house or a cake or some 
other object, if not "of bigotry and virtue," at least of 
interest and personality. The holes they dig are mines and 
tunnels, their games and dances are drama of some sort. 

The question of what shall be reproduced is largely a 
question of what happens to be presented to the chil- 
dren in their daily life. Mother, father, family life ; 
cook, carpenter, railroad train ; kitten, dog, or horse — 
nothing that the child habitually sees before him seems 
alien to this form of treatment. Funeral is said to have 
been a favorite game of Boston children before the sand 
gardens were started. Marriage is very frequent among 
dolls. An omnivorous imitative impulse would seem at 
first sight to be the sole principle at work, rendering the 
child wholly dependent upon his environment for his choice 
of subjects. Or if there is a selection it seems to be merely 
of such actions as lend themselves more readily to imitation. 

And sheer imitation does, as already observed, play an 
important part in all dramatic play, and helps to give to 
the child's actual surroundings the vast importance which, 
as we all acknowledge, they possess. It constitutes both a 
danger and an opportunity. It gives to bad surroundings 
their potency for future evil, while upon the other hand it 

121 



122 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

creates the opportunity, which Froebel has so well shown 
us how to utilize, to inject into the form of dramatic play 
almost any content, provided it be not wholly outside of the 
child's instinctive interests. Children at this age are very 
susceptible to suggestion, and it is our own fault if the 
characters they impersonate and the scenes they reproduce 
are not of an edifying sort. 

Not that all their play should be supervised as strictly 
as in the kindergarten. The kindergarten is a school — a 
course of discipline through which the substance of our 
grown-up conclusions upon the ideals and aims of life is 
infused into the form of children's play. It is training, the 
bending of the young vine toward the trellis that our best 
thought has set up for it. Play leadership outside the 
school should be less strenuous and less exacting. It should 
be largely negative, permitting spontaneous expression 
within the wide area of what a sympathetic understanding 
deems permissible — content, chiefly, with putting up a 
few fences to prevent the children from straying and getting 
hurt. Our leadership moreover, especially at this age, is 
very largely in the sort of lives we liv^. What we are is 
what the child is trying to get at and reproduce and, for 
better or worse, he is going to come pretty near it in the end. 

But the child is not in truth purely imitative, nor wholly 
dependent upon environment and grown-up suggestion for 
his choice of subjects. The dramatic impulse is not so un- 
biased as it seems. The child's mind is not a moving picture 
machine, fated to reproduce any action to which it happens 
to be exposed. The universal prominence of mothers and 
family relations among the objects of imitation, the vogue 
of soldiers — out of all proportion to their frequency of 
actual occurrence, — the ascendency of dolls : such typical 



SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 123 

preferences suggest that there is something else at work. 
Such accent upon war, home, motherhood, and the care of 
children, biologically decisive phenomena, indicates a slant 
in the direction of fundamentals. These and their like are 
the mold in which the species was first formed. It is no 
accident that they have so large a part in the shaping of 
its individual members. 

Sex preferences are conclusive on this point of the existence 
of an innate bias in dramatic play. Boys see as many babies 
as girls do ; girls see as many soldiers as boys ; but their 
respective interest in dolls and soldiers is not the same. It 
is, indeed, often the case that while "Jack will be a soldier" 
yet "Maria'll go to sea"; and there is fortunately but 
slight divergence of the sexes at this early age. It is true 
also that allowance must be made for public opinion as to 
woman's sphere which already presses down, through the 
medium of parents and nurses, aunts and visitors, on the 
little heritors of the inferior status. Nevertheless there is 
enough sex preference left, after all allowances are made, to 
prove beyond question that impersonation does go partly by 
native tendency, and not wholly according to what happens 
to be presented to the child. 

The marked preference for certain things that children 
never see is further evidence upon this point — a preference 
which places bears, lions, and elephants ; sailors and dragons ; 
fairies, ships, and castles; among their constant favorites. 
It may be argued, here also, that suggestion by their elders 
is the explanation. INIr. Noah, for instance, with his inter- 
esting if imperfectly individualized family, is invited and 
introduced by Santa Claus, not selected by the child ; and 
so of most other toys. But how are these selections by the 
elder people to be accounted for? Why lions, bears, and 
fairies? Why not law books, chemicals, and power looms? 



124 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The choice, obviously, has really been made not by the 
grown-ups but by the child. Not by this particular child, 
it is true : it is infinitely more significant than if it had been 
so. It is the taste not of an individual but of all the genera- 
tions of children, of the child universal, that has been con- 
sulted. Childhood demands bears, and the grown-up world 
responds to the demand. 

Sometimes even, at a pinch, the child will create, w^ithout 
a pattern set either to sight or hearing, the object of imper- 
sonation that he requires. The imaginary playmate is the 
classic instance. Nobody needs to tell the little dramatist 
that he might have such a companion; and certainly he 
has not seen him in the flesh. He creates him not because 
an original has been placed before him, but directly, out of 
his need. 

Perhaps in this matter of the unseen playmate the vexed 
question of imitation versus originality may be thought to 
be involved. Let us for the sake of argument — in defer- 
ence to any who may believe that our civilization has evolved 
from that of the amoeba simply by the repetition of given 
elements — assume that the imaginary playmate is made, 
like a rag doll, from borrowed traits of children actually 
observed. All that I mean to point out is that the playmate 
as a whole is not a case of imitation. You would have to 
joggle the child's surroundings a good while before an un- 
seen playmate would drop out of them. Of course it may 
be said that if the traits were borrowed there was no origi- 
nality. So it may be said of Shakespeare that he merely 
shifted about the same old letters of the alphabet but added 
nothing new. Personally, I cannot see that it makes much 
difference what we label this sort of action, provided we can 
come more or less to understand it. 

The dramatic impulse is, then, not wholly undiscriminating. 



SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 125 

If it utilizes what it finds, it also looks for what it wants, 
selects, and even, when necessary, creates it. The cl^ild 
builds up his world, as a tree sends out its branches, in ac- 
cordance with his law of being. He builds it as it must 
be if it is going to be his. The thing that interests him he 
impersonates. If an example of it happens to be before 
him, he will copy it ; if not, he may impersonate it just the 
same. The question about anything he does see is whether 
he needs it in his business. It is true that a child may be 
starved for lack of cop}' : the antennae of the imagination 
may find nothing to fasten on. Or his surroundings may 
select, from among the possible objects of his interest, the 
worst, or the least adapted to our civilization. The bias 
of a living thing is strong toward normality and health, 
but poisons do exist, and vital power may be defeated by 
cramping circumstances or lack of food, as it may be re- 
leased by encounter with the objects and surroundings it 
was stored up to meet. Here, in the provision of the 
most valuable objects of impersonation, lies our oppor- 
tunity. But in order that we may utilize this opportunity 
we must first see how wide it is and in what directions it 
exists. What are the leadings of the child's growth as 
seen in the instinctive bias of the dramatic impulse ? 

A study of the subjects of the child's impersonation 
during the dramatic age is a study of the directions of his 
growth. The dramatic impulse is a mold into which 
almost all his interests are run. 

We come here for the first time across a principle that is 
of cardinal importance, determining the nature of all chil- 
dren's play — and of all the satisfying action of grown 
people as well — the principle, namely, that the best play 
fulfils more than one instinct. A good game, like a good 



126 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

piece of real estate, is placed where two roads meet, and the 
more prevailing the instincts, the more important the 
thoroughfares, the better the game will be. 

Not that the child, or anybody else, is conscious of several 
kinds of satisfaction in a game. It never comes to him that 
way. He does not separately enjoy the building of his 
pile of sand and the attributing to it of its character of 
fairy palace. Outsiders can see how the ingredients were 
mixed, but it is all one drink to him — like William James's 
example of lemonade, not sugar and lemon, but just a single 
taste. But the best drinks are the mixed drinks — in games 
at any rate — and, as I think Herr Groos has said, in all 
aesthetic satisfaction. It is when theme is piled upon theme 
and you hear them all at once, when the reverberation of 
the beginning combines with foretaste of the end, when the 
harmony is deep and complex and the emotional suggestion 
manifold, that the music finally takes possession of you. 
In painting it is not alone, as Whistler taught, the decorative 
that is true art. Rembrandt's portrait of his mother — or 
Whistler's either, for that matter — does not owe its power 
wholly to decorative effect. It makes a difference that 
these lights and shades and harmonies of line or color, with 
the infinitely subtle balance that rules over them, do also 
represent a human face, telling what it would require many 
volumes by a literary genius to convey of the pathos and 
dignity of human life. A spot on the wall, of equal decora- 
tive beauty, would have less effect. 

So the play of the dramatic impulse occurs at the points 
where it crosses the other main interests of the child's life. 
When some day a little girl acts mother for the first time she 
finds herself in the stream of a deeper satisfaction than when 
she was a panther or the master of a ship — though these 
were also good. Her doll she finds standing, like Diana 



SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 127 

at the crossways, where the dramatic impulse crosses the 
great instinct of maternity. So the boy finds Launcelot 
with horse and shining armor awaiting him at the point 
where the ancient mihtary road comes in. Back of the 
dancing, social, and constructive dramatizations — of ring- 
around-a-rosy and mud pies — stand the social and creative 
instincts and the great instinct of rhythm. The stock 
characters of the child's world are t>T)es, ideal forms in 
which the great constituent instincts of humanity appear 
to him and take him by the hand. 

An important part of the child's play now comes at the 
intersection of the dramatic with the constructive instinct. 
The child is no longer content merely to see the sand stick 
together in the form he gave it — it must have a signifi- 
cant coherence. The hole he digs must be a mine, a sub- 
way, or a secret passage; the sandpile is a church or 
theater; blocks form houses, with real stairs and other 
modern conveniences — prominent among which in my own 
case was the "rat-cellar" with which building operations 
always began, and which, according to my notions, no 
family should be without. He now likes to surround his 
houses with a garden, smooth, spacious, and well protected 
by a wall, with vistas of trees, and stately walks marked off 
with shells or stones. Whatever comes within reach is 
pressed into the service, on condition that it will " speak up 
and be somebody." 

It is true that, in spite of this new requirement that 
structures shall be practically useful — as houses, shops, 
rat-cellars, and the like — beauty is by no means ignored. 
Much attention is often paid to symmetry. I knew a little 
girl whose buildings, through the influence of the kinder- 
garten school of architecture, blossomed out into twin 



128 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

towers and a great variety of other symmetrical effects, 
suggestive of the cathedral form — a case of the constructive, 
dramatic, and rhythmic instincts working all at once. There 
was always in front of these buildings a square or piazza, 
bounded on each side by walls symmetrically placed, sug- 
gestive of St. Peter's and other great public buildings. 
Sometimes, indeed, the constructive instinct and the love 
of beauty work independently of the dramatic impulse, and 
the giving of a name to the structure is rather an after- 
thought. On the other hand, the buildings are often not 
merely known to be inhabited, but real people, in the shape 
of the builder's hands, or dolls, or bits of wood, are seen to 
frequent them. Usually the scene thus staged belongs to 
the domestic drama; the building is a house, and its great 
interest is as the scene and symbol of family life. 

In general the subjects of the dramatic impulse, and of 
all a child's play for that matter, are expressive of his main 
relations, present or to come, as to war, maternity, the 
family. But how is it with horses, dogs, and kittens — 
especially with the lions, tigers, and other friends already 
mentioned — who live in Noah's ark or behind the ever- 
green hedge and in the dark corner of the entry? How 
with the ship we built upon the stairs, with the wolves and 
Indians who, as I well remember, were accustomed to jump 
out in droves from behind the stone wall when one was 
riding by — on a short swing in the play room ? How do 
they fit in with this theory of main relations? 

As to the dog and cat and horse, — these are themselves 
members of the family always accepted by the child as such. 
Horse is also, I believe, a specific instinct by itself. The 
centaur is not a wholly legendary animal. This four-footed 
ally is as much a part of some men as their hands and feet : 



SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 129 

like Browning, they pine and grow homesick in a horseless 
world. Ilengist and Horsa are succeeded by the age of 
chivalry or horsey period; then comes Carlyle's gigmanic 
age ; and even to-day the horse holds his own, and will hold 
it against airship and automobile, because he is in our blood. 
Cossack, cowboy, or belted knight — the man on horseback 
is our favorite as an heroic figure because the horse is part 
of our inherited ideal of man. We have grown up with this 
friend so Iwig that we are almost as much his product as he 
is ours, and imply his presence by a prophetic bowleggedness 
of mind. 

There is also, of course, in this horse play, a wholesome 
joy in noise when a piece of tin is dragged as a fire engine, 
and in personal greatness when one mounts upon the chair 
as grocer's cart. 

And as to animals in general — even the bears and 
elephants one never saw — these are members in full stand- 
ing if not of the family, at least of the child's world — poor 
relations, perhaps, if not main relations. Children are 
primitive. They live upon the edge of the same world as 
the animals and can get upon terms of mutual understanding 
with them far more easily than grown-up people can. A 
child can half strangle a puppy or a kitten without creating 
hard feeling, when a grown person cannot even get near 
them. To be on visiting terms with one's friend the lion 
or one's gossip the elephant, to invite them to games and 
dinner parties, is the simple and natural thing to do. As 
they are our friends and gossips, why be rude? The child's 
view is that of the Indian, to whom the beaver, muskrat, 
moose are his very good friends, to be treated with a grave 
courtesy and consideration, even if, driven by hard neces- 
sity, he must sometimes make a seemingly unsympathetic 
use of them. And which after all knows most about the 



130 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

animals, the Indian or the white man? For myself, I half 
suspect that child and Indian are right. 

And the ships and wolves and lions ? These are servants 
of the spirit of adventure, heralds of man the wanderer, who 
thus like Siegfried sounds his bugle call before him as he 
comes. If man had not liked a little danger in the cup he 
would not be here. When you go down the entry as far as 
you dare and rush back in a state of delicious terror from 
the impending onslaught of "the howls and the wools," 
you are only repeating a game that must have been popular 
among the cave dwellers — and long before. 

When the play is of fairies, kings, and giants, it serves, as 
stories later serve, to project the mind into regions that 
are its own by virtue of knowing how to long for them. 
Wings were, for many centuries before the aeroplane, a 
need recognized by the well-balanced mind — and it is 
remarkable how generally in children's play this lack has 
been attended to. It is in virtue of such imaginings that 
things at last take place. So in fairy music, in unseen 
messengers, seven-league boots, every discovery that directly 
fulfills a human longing has been thus anticipated. The child 
starts with an adventure of the imagination, assumes the 
thing as done, and looks out upon the world from the vantage 
ground of an ideal attained. The relation here fulfilled is 
that of the child to what belongs to him, not now as a child, 
nor perhaps ever as an individual, but as the blossom of a 
race that inherits the earth. 

Finally the child seems often to be directed in his choice 
of subjects for impersonation by the sheer force of curiosity, 
the instinct to make acquaintance with the world, unbiased 
by any ulterior motive. The relation here is one of spiritual 
kinship to the world at large. He feels the universe to be 
at bottom of one nature with himself, and desires to know 



SUBJECTS OF IMPERSONATION 131 

more of it as in the case of any other friend. We are of one 
blood, you and I ; he feels spontaneous sympathy for the 
sailing moon, the twinkling stars, the whispering leaves, 
the alert escaping squirrels, the talkative birds who make 
such cozy nests — something in his heart is fulfilled in each 
of these. 

Whatever its precise character or direction, curiosity is 
certainly a mighty force in impersonation, as in all the play 
of children in this and in each succeeding phase. The 
tendency to question things, to find what they are up to 
and may mean for us, to see what lies behind, has been, I 
take it, among the chief fortune makers of the race. It is 
of the master builders of our nature, and must have its share 
in the molding of the child if he is ever to be recognized as 
ours. 

Such are the subjects of impersonation. They radiate 
out along the main lines of growth — of fighting, nurture, 
rhythm, and social membership, of creation and curiosity. 
And upon these radii, by means of this activity, proceeds 
the growth of the child of the dramatic age. 



CHAPTER XIX 

SOCIAL PLAY OF TIIE DRAMATIC AGE 

The reason children impersonate so many and such various 
things — the trees, the wind, the fire engine, father, mother, 
doctor, dog, and cat — is that all the world seems to them 
to be alive. Thus all their dramatic play is social in a 
sense ; they are true citizens of the world, and every object 
that interests them is their friend and playmate. 

But children are also social in a more special manner. 
It is no accident that so much of their play centers in the 
family, that they are forever playing "house," making 
dining rooms and nurseries with the chairs, and taking the 
parts of father, mother, nurse, and child, or that their con- 
structive play is chiefly a reproduction of domestic life. 
The children themselves go outdoors, and have adventures 
not especially connected with the family; but their dolls 
hardly ever enjoy such opportunities — or when they go 
abroad it is for the sake of being dressed for the occasion and 
to permit the display of parental authority in curbing their 
frequent and lamentable transgressions. Discipline — the 
family tie in its most salient, if least idyllic, manifestation — 
fills a large place in the imagination of the dramatic age. 

This peculiar interest in the leading characters of family 
life and their doings is, as already indicated, not wholly 
because these are the chief personages of the world drama 
as presented to the observation of the child. Nor is it to 
be accounted for entirely by their practical relations to him- 
self. It is not because he sees his mother more than any one 

132 



SOCIAL PLAY OF THE DRAMATIC AGE 133 

else (I am speaking of real families), nor because she superin- 
tends his dressing, meals, and exercise, that he is so obsessed 
by her. The reason she is so often his heroine is that he 
expected her, that there is a place for a mother in the world 
which he instinctively assumes. 

And his expectation, after the first year or so, is of the 
mother not only in a personal but in a representative capac- 
ity, as an embodiment of home. Father and mother are 
the fulfillment of his anticipatory faith in this relation. As 
he first felt "this is she," so he soon feels "this is the place," 
and his heart turns to his home as flowers toward the sun 
because by his nature it is his source of warmth and life. 
His mind and affections imply the home as certainly as his 
lungs imply air or his stomach food. His heart goes out to 
it as inevitably as his hand reaches for materials and tools. 
The home is in his blood. His whole spiritual nature is 
built around this institution as his body is made to fit his 
physical environment. 

Child and family are correlative — parts of a single whole. 
They grew together and are in truth but one phenomenon. 
It was the rise of the family that made infancy possible, — 
that long period of helplessness in a world of internecine 
competition. Without it there could never have been a 
child at all. He is the creature of this institution as the 
fish is the creature of the sea, the bird of the air ; and his 
every thought and tendency has reference to it. So when a 
child acts father or mother for an afternoon he not only 
experiences an interesting personality, but he sees an all 
envel(^ing relation from the other side, enters more inti- 
mately into that primal social unit of which he is a product 
and a part. 

Social membership, which thus has its first growth in 
the inner circle of the home, is the great moralizing influence 



134 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

in our lives, the source of obligation and self-sacrifice. The 
mark of all morality is subordination. Surrender to some- 
thing greater than one's self is of the essence of the spiritual 
life — of all life, for there are not two kinds. The egoist 
inevitably shrivels in mind as in soul; and if his body, 
being tough and well-fed, survives, it is rather as an en- 
cumbrance than as an instrument of life. Subordination 
is the first lesson in the art of living. The growing artist 
is not the slick and talented young man who has learned 
the trick and become self-satisfied, but he who has heard 
the god and still humbly listens for him. The growing 
man in any calling is the one who feels his insignifi- 
cance in presence of its greater laws. It is when you lose 
yourself in the game, give yourself to the cause, begin to 
feel that the work is bigger than you are, that full life pos- 
sesses you, or that true growth takes place. The game, 
the cause, the work, is in truth your larger self that calls to 
you. You can go forth to welcome it or you can sit shiver- 
ing at home. But it is only as you do give yourself to it 
that the greater current will take and carry you along. 

The doctor is as strong a witness on this point as is the 
educator or the moralist. He tells you to forget yourself, 
to travel, play games, take up some outside interest. The 
prescription may not be very practicable of execution, but 
its aim is plain enough. The way to save soul or body, 
physical or spiritual life, is to have your treasure, object of 
devotion, moral center of gravity, outside yourself. The 
very bones and muscles would rather be going somewhere, 
if it is only to the postoffice, than merely taking a constitu- 
tional. The mind soon wearies of self-improvement. The 
very word "culture" gives everyone a sinking feeling: 
rather go fishing, if it is only for flounders — go after some- 
thing at least more refreshing than your own insides — than 



SOCIAL PLAY OF THE DRAMATIC AGE 135 

fish forever with this mehincholy bait, or rather for this 
melancholy fish, of self-improvement. The heart under- 
stands this principle. It can go out to many kinds of ob- 
jects, some not so good as others; but it must go out to 
something, if it is only a primrose on the river's brim, be- 
fore it can beat to any purpose. You must lose your life 
to win it; you must lose your heart or you will have no 
heart to lose. 

And the subordination most necessary to health in human 
beings is this of social membership. It is not enough to be 
given to your art or business. You must be subject also 
to your parents, your city, your community. We are by 
our nature inexorably, and independent of any choice on 
our part, members of a social whole. Its laws run through 
us as surely as the law of gravitation runs through all matter, 
to make or mar our souls according as we obey or disregard 
them. Citizenship is a profession to which we all belong, 
having been apprenticed thereto for the last few million 
years, and according to our proficiency in which we are 
judged, not by a gullible public, but by ourselves. 

The home is the first form of the state, the inmost circle 
in which our power of membership is exercised, the first 
school of the belonging instinct. It is through the child's 
membership in the family that the citizen in him gets his 
deepest growth. The instinct of children of this age is not 
mistaken. The home is the natural habitat of the human 
young, of the child's soul even more than of his body, the 
moral center around which he is formed. 

Of course the child knows nothing of all this ; he has no 
social theories ; but he feels it none the less and is compelled 
by it. He acts father, mother, house, instinctively and in 
obedience to a law as inevitable as that which makes the 
wolf run with the pack or the bee devote his life to the hive. 



136 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

For the same reason he acts out those trades that touch 
the family — as doctor, farmer, carpenter. These interest 
him as types, embodiments of the family relation to the 
outside world. The radiance diminishes as you recede from 
the home until it merges into the zone of comparatively 
haphazard selection. 

A failure to recognize that the child's interest in certain 
trades is due to their relation to the home has led some 
educators to prefer that city children in the kindergarten 
should impersonate the crossing sweeper, whom they have 
actually seen, rather than the farmer whom they have 
not seen, as tending to arouse a more practical interest. 
Their mistake is that involved in all directly practical 
education of children of the dramatic age. It is true, for 
instance, that the immature hand, which might have squan- 
dered its time on dolls, may be taught to hold knitting, and 
in a year or two almost to knit. So the imagination that 
sees a cow or a steam engine in what is really only a bit of 
wood can be set right, and the child put to work, instead, at 
studying the difference between spruce and maple. He 
could thus be made to acquire, in the three years of the 
dramatic age, almost as much practical knowledge on that 
head as a child of ten would pick up in five minutes ; but 
meantime the age for the inward realization of the family, 
the trades related to it, and other things that really interest 
the child — of obtaining a sympathetic insight into his 
surroundings — will have gone by and left its all important 
function unfulfilled. 

The precocious acquirement of knowledge is a process 
by which one thing done badly at the wrong time takes the 
place of two things that might each have been done well 
when the time was ripe for it. The way to cultivate a child 
or any growing thing is to help it as it is growing now, not 



SOCIAL PLAY OF THE DRAMATIC AGE 137 

to do what would help it at some other time. The end of 
the apple tree, from our poiat of view, is apples. But 
there is no use talking apples to it in the spring. If you 
can protect its buds from frost or its leaves from cater- 
pillars, or can supply it better diet for its roots, it will be 
grateful to you. And however little the bud or leaf or root 
may look like apples to you, be sure that the tree knows the 
way and the time and that your best contribution is in 
assisting nature on the path she has marked out. Time- 
liness, as Emerson said, is the lesson of the garden, and it 
would be a blessed thing if we would apply this lesson to 
plants whose growth is more important than that even of 
roses or potatoes. 

But the family is not the only social object of children of 
the dramatic age. There is also the society of their con- 
temporaries. The child of the preceding period — that is 
until he approaches three years old — has little social sense 
toward his equals. At those functions at which a hostess 
aged some two years is at home to her friends and their 
respective chaperons, you will see one child crawl over 
another without the slightest sense of encountering anything 
more than a physical impediment. Or he will abstract 
a plaything from the hand of another child in perfect uncon- 
sciousness of doing anything unkind. He is not selfish, he is 
simply oblivious of the other's existence as anythin^g more 
than a physical object in the landscape. He sees something 
he wants, in a convenient place, and takes it as he would 
take it off a cushion or a chair. A child below three years 
old will sometimes, it is true, show an interest in his con- 
temporaries, as in other flora and fauna of his environment, 
or even a little more than toward the rest. But it is an 
interest that does not strongly impel to any common enter- 



138 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

prise or often survive his natural absorption in his own 
pursuits. 

But at someVhere about the age of three there comes a 
change. The child now seeks the society of other children, 
and begins not merely to like to have them round but to 
cooperate with them. Indeed the play of this age is, in 
form at least, more social than for many years thereafter; 
for it is always cooperative, the age of competition not 
having yet arrived. The children now join together in their 
building operations; their dolls form a visiting acquaint- 
ance; they themselves form households, or armies for the 
expulsion of the invader; or present George Washington, 
with a select group of his leading generals, looking sternly 
out upon his country's foes. 

It is very important that this new social tendency should 
have its way. For the American child especially, who for 
all these years has had the care of the whole family upon his 
shoulders, directing the actions of his father and mother, 
of the servants and the stranger within the gates, it is well 
that he should occasionally have a chance to lay aside the 
cares of office and unbend. It is too much for any one to 
have to make all the decisions as to what is to be done. 
And in the society of his contemporaries he finds others 
ready to relieve him of this task. He is now among his 
equals, and after the first shock of finding himself seriously 
opposed he enjoys the experience. 

It is not only American children in whom this need has 
been observed. Plato remarks that children under seven 
should be brought together in groups by nurses instructed 
to teach them songs and games, — which is, I think, the 
earliest mention of the kindergarten. The mere coming 
together — learning, as Goethe put it, to look level as well 
as up or down — is an essential part of any form of child- 



SOCIAL PLAY OF THE DRAMATIC AGE 139 

gardening that can by any possibility succeed. Great are 
the disadvantages of the sheltered life, at least when a 
growing thing is sheltered from the sun and rain, or other 
elements on which its life depends. 

Very characteristic of the play of this age is the ring 
game, and very significant. The fairies used to dance in 
rings; and these children are still in the age of fairies. It 
is true the meaning is at first not wholly clear to grown 
folks, to whom a game which has no particular end and in 
which you cannot say who won is an absurdity. I remember 
I watched that wonderful game, Ring-around-a-Rosy, for 
several years to see what it was. And then I found it 
wasn't anything. But it really was something neverthe- 
less, and something very important. There is in the ring 
game the sense of belonging to a social whole. It is not 
merely you and me and Mary and Jim and ]\Iike, but all of 
us together. We feel and care about the ring itself. There 
is a sense of personal loss if . it gets broken — to have it 
squashed in on one side gives a sense of impaired personality 
like having your hat bumped in, and we hasten in such case, 
with much squealing, to mend or round it out again. The 
ring is now a part of us, as we of it ; our joy extends through 
it, and we find ourselves engaged to maintain it in its integ- 
rity. It is an extension of ourselves, a new personality. 
We act now not as individuals, but as the ring ; its success 
is our success, and what hits it hits us. The ring, like the 
family, is a social whole. Membership in it is participation 
in a firm, a corporation, a persona. The ring game is the 
first form of the democratic state, as the family is the orig- 
inal of the patriarchal form of government. 

Children in the ring games, as in the family relation, 
are in the direct exercise of the belonging instinct, which is 
not an impulse to think about other people, or to feel their 



140 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

interests in an altruistic way, but an impulse to think and 
feel as the social body of which you and they are parts — 
to have the soul of it in you and act out from that. No com- 
bination or elaboration of the relations of the individual 
members to each other would ever explain this new experi- 
ence any more than motion can be explained in terms of 
position. The member of a family, firm, team, that has a 
real existence enters into, and is entered by, its corporate 
personality and, so far as he is truly a member, is governed 
by it as he is governed by his individual will when acting 
in his individual capacity. The citizen does not merely 
serve his country ; he is his country — speaks with its voice, 
feels with its heart, thrills wdth its purpose, is instinct with 
its ideals. 

I do not mean that there is in the social whole a personality 
in any supernatural sense — anything for instance that 
would survive if all the individuals that share in it were 
to be killed — or that it has any existence except in their 
several minds. Nor do I suppose there is any special or 
peculiar way of transmitting corporate thought or feeling 
from one individual to another. What I do mean is that 
each individual member of a true society conceives not merely 
of a number of other individuals acting with him, but of a 
corporate w^hole; that he acts toward this supposed per- 
sonality, is acted on by it, and above all assumes it, puts 
it on, acts out from it as its voice and representative ; and 
that he assumes that the other members do the same. The 
team, country, family, corporation, is an ideal body exist- 
ing and acting in the minds of its members. It is, in each 
member, what he is able to see and feel in it. Its creation 
and maintenance is an act of faith, — : the faith of each in his 
own conception of it and in the corresponding faith of all 
the rest. 



SOCIAL PLAY OF THE DRAMATIC AGE 141 

]\Ien, like the other social animals, have this conception 
and this faith instinctively. It is a force that acts in them 
irrespective of any choice on their part, though its power 
may be lessened or enhanced by obeying or disregarding it. 
It assigns to them a social life as truly as the leaves are 
assigned a cooperative existence in the life of the tree. 
And as the leaf is the original unit of the plant, so the state 
and family are trees made up of human leaves. Their 
roots and branches are invisible except to faith, but the con- 
nection is real and vital. The service of all our social in- 
stitutions — history, public buildings, monuments, flag, 
patriotic song and ritual — is to clothe this unseen body of 
the state, give it reality to us and give us faith in its reality. 

The power of corporate membership is the greatest spiritual 
power there is. It gives to an individual the voice and 
authority of a people's soul, gives the patriot a purpose 
transcending his individual existence, so that his private 
fortune, even his life or death, become to him of secondary 
importance. He enters the orbit of a vaster personality 
and moves with the power and serenity of a secular force. 

Am I claiming too much for a mere childish game ? Not 
when we realize that this game is the outcropping in the 
growing mind of an instinct without which there would not 
have been any child at all, or any human race for him to 
grow upon. What the child, in the ring game, acquires 
is a beginning only, a little bud, but the parent of a great 
branch. Except as he is member, citizen, the child will 
lack the chief basis of morality. He will scarce be human, 
will miss the most precious part of his inheritance. 

And as this faculty is not reducible to other elements, 
it can be developed only by the practice of its peculiar 
function. No other powers, nor any combination of them, 
can take its place. It is like a sixth sense, and can no more 



142 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

be produced from other elements than sight can be com- 
pounded out of taste and hearing. Thousands of years of 
sharing our hearth and home have not sufficed to domesticate 
the cat. He is still the cat that walks by himself, because 
membership is but a very feeble element of the feline soul. 
The only way to belong is to belong ; and the only way to 
develop this faculty is by belonging. The child in whom 
the belonging instinct has not been exercised according to 
its nature will always lack the power of expressing it. The 
instinct itself will atrophy. The family, the state, will be 
left out of him, or only partially developed. 

And the time for this development is now, when the 
instinct clearly calls for exercise. Our answer to this call 
will determine the child's power of membership, the extent 
to which, so far as he is concerned, the state or family or 
church or any social organism shall exist. This power, 
like the rest, must be developed when the time is ripe ; if 
it misses this first instinctive training, its most precious 
opportunity is gone. No subsequent experience can set its 
mark so deep. 



CHAPTER XX 

RHYTHM 

A FEATURE of every ring game is the chanting of some sort 
of a verse and dancing to it. Half the sense of getting to- 
gether is in the sing-song, made as sing-songy as possible, 
of these well-worn classics. In the method of their render- 
ing nobody is left in doubt as to the interpretation of the 
theme. The long syllables are given with a peculiar drawl, 
of which even a little seems long, and which constitutes 
the special vox populi of this earliest commonwealth. The 
accent is come down on with the combined weight of the 
whole company, with the apparent intention of driving it 
into the spinal marrow of all hearers ; the climax is reached 
in an ecstasy of common consciousness. 

When, with the succeeding age of child development, the 
game itself ceases to be rhythmical, rhythm still survives 
in the form of counting out, — eenie, meenie, minie, mo, etc., 
— which, it should be noted, is not a mere preliminary but 
a part of the established ritual of the game. Children for 
instance never take the short cut of making the first on whom 
the fatal syllable falls It, but always go through the whole 
process of elimination until only one is left. 

During the dramatic age there is rhythm not only in their 
games but in almost everything the children do. Not only 
is social fusion intensified, but social penalties are enforced, 
through this medium. The teasing rh>Tne mentioned by 
Herr Groos is applied only too rigorously to any unfortunate 
who has incurred the reprobation of the company, to the 

143 



144 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

tune (the identical one, I should imagine, that the old cow 
died of) that is also appropriate to the well-known lyric : 



i 



it 



^B 



-<^ 



i 



•- 



jg-^- r ^ f 



-^-x 



Wad-ing in the waa - ter, Maa-ma told me naa - ter. 

The early saga tendency persists through this age, along 
with that to celebrate almost any statement in a chant and 
to turn any repeated movement into a dance. As the age 
wanes into the succeeding one, the dancing and singing become 
more specialized, and the hurdy-gurdy has power to turn every 
street into a ballroom, at least for the little girls. 

Rhythmic play does not indeed begin with the dramatic 
age. A sense of rhythm is manifest very early in some of 
the movements of the arms and legs and in the first forms 
of vocal exercise. There is rhythm in that emphatic repeti- 
tion of one syllable — gaa-gaa-gaa-gaa-^aa — of which the 
earliest discourse so generally consists and in which the 
orator takes such evident satisfaction, as of one who has 
settled that question at all events. The cogency which the 
youthful Demosthenes so evidently feels is in fact present 
in the logical completeness of the rhythm itself. He really 
did land on the last syllable in a way to clinch the metric 
proposition. So also children often do their kicking — both 
heels at once, bang, bang, bang, on the bed or sofa — to a 
very spirited sort of march time. Much of the symmetrical 
crab-like movement with the arms, bringing the hands to- 
gether like a pair of ice tongs, evidently gives a rhythmic 
satisfaction, — a fact that has been recognized by the elders 
in the game of pat-a-cake. 

Pat-a-cake itself is the beginning of a new manifestation 
of the rhythmic impulse, combining as it does rhythm of 



RHYTHM 145 

motion and rhythm of sound — dancing, music, poetry, 
and social intercourse — all in one. Many, and highly 
satisfactory to the youthful poet and dramatist, are the 
games of this class, such as rock-a-by-baby, ride a cock 
horse, I had a little hobbyhorse, this little pig went to mar- 
ket. These games fulfill the original undifferentiated rhyth- 
mic impulse, to which all forms of manifestation are much 
alike, and which loves thus to use them all at once. In 
them we see rhythm in its aboriginal form, parent of the 
Muses, for which song and dance and poetry are not yet 
separated. Mother Latona herself is revealed to us in the 
early mother play. It is true this undifferentiated form of 
rhythm has its forerunners in the kicking and talking 
rhythms; but these soon instinctively coalesce. They are 
perhaps the ancestors of the gods rather than the gods 
themselves. The uncommitted rhythmic desire finds its 
outlet now here, now there, then everywhere at once, before 
it again separates into more special and more highly devel- 
oped manifestations. 

Grown people, it must be admitted, have an essential 
part in the development of this whole class of song and move- 
ment games. The child knows nothing of pigs going to 
market, of adventures with a hobbyhorse, or of ladies with 
bells on their toes, until somebody instructs him in such 
matters. But he is nevertheless responsible for these mani- 
festations as the public is always responsible for the sort 
of entertainment it receives. He and his instinctive predi- 
lections constitute the demand which the inventions of his 
elders strive to satisfy. These jingles first appear in the 
response of grown people to the child's rhythmic "talk." 
They begin by saying "gaa-gaa-gaa-graa" after him, following 
his accent and gesture, as an instinctive sign that this is a 
responsive world and that his effort was noticed and under- 



146 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

stood. Much nonsense talked to children is pernicious, 
but not so this first answer to their signals. Rhyme and 
reason are, indeed, two modes of thought, each with a logic 
of its own, and the instinct that responds to rhyme when 
it appears alone, as it does at first, is a sound one. If the 
Martians wait until we can talk plain prose to them before 
they answer, I fear the establishment of communication 
will be long delayed. 

After a time, when the main stem of rhythm — with its 
combined expression in drama, dance, and song — takes 
definite form in the ring game, the instinct throws off a 
branch, combining song and story, but without a dance 
accompaniment, — from which branch again, a little later 
on, another sub-branch, the story set only to the rhythmic 
jingle but without a tune, again separates. (The final 
separation, giving us the story without rhythm, comes at 
a later stage.) There thus appear the distinctly literary — 
as distinguished from the musical and athletic — forms of 
rhythm, so well illustrated in the selected wisdom of Mother 
Goose. 

I believe some people disapprove of this sportful old lady 
as a first guide to children in the august realms of literature. 
Certainly some of her more ancient lyrics are crude enough ; 
and once in a long time a Stevenson or a IVIrs. Follen comes 
along who can improve on them. But on the whole her 
melodies are not only harmless but they have the great 
merit of possessing pith and point suited to the child's 
understanding, and of being free from tiresome and extrane- 
ous morality. But the prose meaning of these early clas- 
sics (some people say the same of Shakespeare) is compara- 
tively a minor matter. The sound is the important thing. 
As the successors of gaa-gaa-gaa-gaa, their meaning to 
the child is necessarily only a little less vague than that 



RHYTHM 147 

of the lyrics that they have superseded. Their merit is 
in that they are of marked and varied rhythm, so married 
to the words that the two inevitably stick together and 
stick in the memory as a permanent possession and a means 
of further assimilation. What they mainly do for the child 
is to give him the freedom of the world of rhythm, teach 
him the first paces of the mind, the varying gaits of thought 
and action. It is an important enlargement of one's world 
to be made free of a variety of meters, to be enabled to think 
and act in trochee, dactyl, or iambus, as the spirit moves, 
and to enter into the feelings of others who do the same — 
to understand with Touchstone who Time ambles withal, 
who Time trots withal, and who he gallops withal, and how 
it feels to have him do it. 

Children do in fact take up the various rhythms into their 
thought and action at a very early age, and the lyrics they 
compose show traces of their new literary power — as seen, 
for instance, in the following stanzas composed by a child 
of less than two years old, much and variously repeated but 
in substantially the following form : 

Apostrophe to a Sister Susan 

Susie, Poozie, tickety Oozie, 
How does your garden go ? 
She is the Toozie, she is the Oozie, 
She is the Baby Bo. 

On waking up and seeing her Parents returned from a 

Journey 

The lady she cooks at the back of the stair. 

And when she woke up again 

Who do you tliink she saw ? 

Papa and Mamma come back again 

From DubbeHn, Bubbelin, Ubbelin. 



148 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The origin of the lady who cooks — a great character at 
that time, often reappearing in the productions of this partic- 
ular child — I have been unable to trace. 

A special manifestation of the rhythmic impulse during 
the dramatic age is in the popularity of the swing, a popu- 
larity universal and extraordinary, first attaching to the 
paternally supplied apparatus for 

Swing, swong, the days are long, 
Johnnie shall have a new master, 

but soon applying to the familiar and more generally avail- 
able arrangement of rope and board. Children, if permitted 
to do so, will swing for almost any length of time. A small 
girl on one of the first public playgrounds, who was forced 
to surrender her swing to another child at eleven o'clock in 
the morning, said, "I should think you might let me keep 
on; I have been here since six." Swings on a playground 
never stop, and I have no doubt that, with a little ingenuity 
and a sufficient plant, an enterprising community might 
supply itself with electric lighting by this means. Often 
the mere "See saw, Marjorie Daw" movement is varied by 
the development of stunts — standing up singly or in twos, 
going up until the rope slacks and gives an exhilarating 
jounce, jumping off, sometimes jumping on, kicking the 
ceiling if there is one — as well as by letting the old cat die. 
But even straight swinging, forward and back, the same 
motion endlessly repeated, has a perennial charm. 

The source of this fascination is probably impossible 
to explain. A part of it to some children is in the stimulus 
to the imagination. I can remember dashing along on horse- 
back, hotly pursued by combinations of wolves, Kickapoos 
and Shawnees, who were always jumping out from behind 



RHYTHM 149 

the stone wall and were to be distanced only by the most 
extraordinary leaps performed by the gallant animal I rode 

— a swing about five feet long. There is, L think, something 
in the nature of foreign travel in rushing through the air at 
such a speed, past scenes which the motion stunulates the 
imagination to conjure up. No doubt the rapid motion itself 
is also, as in many other sports, a large part of the attrac- 
tion. 

There is also something pleasant in the element of falling 

— as the proprietors of pleasure parks have so fully real- 
ized. There is no short cut to the emotions like the rapid 
drop. It gives at once the same visceral sensations (which 
are the emotion according to William James) which it would 
otherwise require a full-blown melodrama to produce. It 
is an interesting fact, at all events, that almost all of the 
successful playground apparatus furnishes this sensation, 

— from the most elaborate giant stride or traveling rings 
to the ancestral cellar door. 

But I believe that the chief attraction of the swing is in 
its satisfaction of the sense of rhythm. It fulfils the rhyth- 
mic impulse in a special form that is very deep in us, namely, 
that of the perpetually recurring antithesis. The swing 
forward and the swing back, with the pause between them 
of an accumulating impulse, present this antithesis of the 
alternating rhythm in a very satisfying form. Forward 
and backward — up and down — society and solitude — 
exertion and repose — Republican, Democrat — Tweedle- 
dum, Tweedledee — you can go on forever with this alterna- 
tion. The longer you go on, indeed, the less tired you 
become, the more indifferent to what is happening, or is 
going to happen. The experience is hypnotic: as a friend 
of mine has put it, swinging is a form of sleep. 

The alternating rhythm that sets children swinging reap- 



150 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

pears throughout life in many forms. There is fascination 
in antithesis of sound as well as in that of motion. I remem- 
ber a small child who spent weeks repeating "the butcher 
the bear; the butcher the bear," and another who found 
added exliilaration in her bath by steadily proclaiming 
"I'm the bumsey, Ma's the wasserjunks!" This alterna- 
tion runs through all our music, poetry, literature, architec- 
ture, decoration. Popular songs are often built on nothing 
else. The very names Josephus and Bohunker, in one 
fondly remembered, are of such satisfying antithesis that 
it seems strange their fame could ever die ; the Walrus and 
the Carpenter are another pair that never will. A part of 
the beauty of the Psalms is that we seem to hear in their 
antiphony the eternal rhythm of morning and evening, 
day and night, the breaking and the receding wave. This 
alternation created the terza rinia of the Renaissance and 
all that has followed from it, down to the common-sense 
antitheses of INIacaula}^ and the political oratory of the 
commonplace that echoes these. 

What is at the bottom of the rest and satisfaction that 
swinging and other forms of the alternating rhythm bring 
us it is impossible to say. It seems to correspond to the 
inevitable rhythm of human life ; exertion and satisfaction, 
going forth and coming home, meeting at night and parting 
in the morning, a question and an answer, venture and 
success, a demand and a supply. But in the main I think 
our satisfaction here, as in the other forms of rhythm, can- 
not be analyzed. We like it because we are tuned to like 
it. As every bridge has its keynote to which it vibrates, 
so we vibrate to this sort of theme. Rhythm is an 
ultimate fact of our spiritual make-up. It is one of 
the motives that formed us and that still persist and act 
throughout our being. We are ourselves a song, an alterna- 



RHYTHM 151 

tion, a metric composition, and to that which strikes the 
meter to which we live we inevitably give response. There 
are, it is true, physical reasons why inspiration and expira- 
tion, systole and diastole, feasting and fasting, work and 
rest, must alternate ; but our ready acceptance of their 
alternation is rather to be explained by the fact that we are, 
spiritually speaking, rhythmic creatures than our joy in 
rhythm by these physical conditions. Very possibly Nature 
made our spirits rhythmic in order that we might fit in with 
the rhythm of all her other works, including our own physi- 
cal make-up. But given our constitution as it is, our joy in 
rhythm is not derived from its physical convenience, but is 
an ultimate and controlling fact. 

Tilting supplies another form of alternating rhythm that 
children like; and it is interesting to observe how large a 
part on any successful playground is taken by the trapeze, 
flying and traveling rings, and teeter ladder, which are vari- 
ous forms of tilt or swing. The really popular uses of hori- 
zontal bars and ladders are largely in the swinging from 
them. 

Rhythm, which thus takes its start in the combined kick- 
ing and vocalizing play, and develops through Mother 
Goose on the one hand and the ring games on the other 
into dancing, literature, and the drama, is through life the 
basis of all the arts, or at least an essential element in all. 
Without the activity within him of this instinct a man can- 
not be an artist; without so much of it as to render him 
susceptible to sympathetic vibration, he cannot be an appre- 
ciator of art. 

And the essence of rhythm is always in the sense of mo- 
tion. Unless you feel it in your toes you have not fully 
caught the author's meaning. Dancing is the parent of 
the arts and survives in all her offspring. Chopin derived 



152 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the inspiration for some of his music from Fanny Elsler's 
dancing. ]\Iusic is dancing freed from the limitations of 
anatomy. It is the reminiscence of motion in poetry, and 
partly even in architecture, that carries its appeal. All 
that touches us — moves us, as we say — is motion or some 
translation of it. And rhythm is the voice of motion to us, 
the form in which it has entry to our minds. Art, in what- 
ever body it appears, has always a dancing fairy at its heart. 
Those who desire their children to have the enlargement of 
the great world of art will do well to encourage those plays 
in which, through bodily motion, the soul and radiating 
center of all the arts gets established in them and entwined 
with the jSrst and deepest elements of their growth. 



CHAPTER XXI 

RHYTHM AND LIFE 

Art is not the only end of rhythm, if indeed it is, biologi- 
cally speaking, an end at all, or anything more than a by- 
product. The instinct has some very practical uses suited 
to the strictly business level at which nature works. 

One of these uses is to regulate those voluntary actions 
of which repetition is the characteristic, such as walking, 
running, rowing, and those monotonous forms of manual 
work that are not yet taken over by machinery. 

Rhythm makes walking all one act instead of a succession 
of acts; each step not a new enterprise but the effect, 
along with all its brothers, of a single decree of the mind : 
the apparatus that coins them is set in motion by the pull- 
ing of a single lever and continues to reel them off as 
long as the power is applied. And each step is not merely 
suggested by the preceding one, as in a sequence of varying 
acts that has become habitual; nor is the simplification 
merely in the fact that they are all alike, replicas of a com- 
mon plate, — the same step repeated rather than a new 
one produced each time. They are not merely strung one 
to another like links in a chain, nor merely repetitions, but 
are all one act. It is rhythm that makes this fusion. The 
process of walking or rowing, or of other forms of repetition, 
ceases to be a succession of syllables by becoming all one 
song. 

And the value of the fusion thus produced is not 
merely in its economy of mental effort through reducing 

153 



154 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

many acts to one, but in giving to that one a peculiar power 
of its own. Once he has got into the swing of it, got into 
his stride, a man's gait or stroke carries him along by its 
own momentum, almost without exertion on his part. The 
song is a little different in different men ; each has his own 
walk, set to his own motif, not only adapted, in its catapult 
or flail-like motion, to the physical conformation of his legs, 
but expressive also of his character and temperament. A 
Boston gentleman traveling in Bavaria looks down from 
the window of a show castle and remarks : " Why, that 
boy must be a Tremont." He had never seen the partic- 
ular boy, but he knew the Tremont walk. A man has his 
own gait as he has his own voice or his own handwriting; 
but it always has this in common with all others that, once 
set going, it does his walking for him. 

We speak of the burden of a song, meaning its time and 
swing, the heft or lift of it. The rhythm carries the walk 
upon its back ; it puts a soul inside it. 

Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,l 
And merrily hent the style-a ; 
A merry heart goes all the day, > 

Your sad tires in a mile-a. 

A good gait has almost a demon of its own that does the 
work. When the baby kicks and waves his arms to a rhyth- 
mic measure, when he dances and claps his hands in time 
to the chanting of the ring game, he is invoking a power 
that will carry him over many a hard road and through 
many a tedious day in after life. 

Closely allied to the carrying power of rhythm is its 
hypnotic effect. The cradle has been discarded along with 
other drugs, and fathers no longer walk the floor at night 
swinging their wakeful offspring in their arms so habitually 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 155 

as the comic papers would have us think. But there is no 
doubt as to the effect of rocking. It is one of the recognized 
ways of the attainment of Nirvana. 

And every repeated act, with grown-ups almost as much 
as with children, tends to fall into a sort of chant. People 
engaged in any monotonous occupation are apt to hum or to 
hear inwardly a musical accompaniment. And the humming, 
or the rhythm of the movement itself, soon deadens our 
sensibilities. Facts and sensations begin to lose their 
sharp outlines and then to fade away, until we become obliv- 
ious to the passing time. Repeated sound soon becomes 
a lullaby. Repeated action, when we have got as we say 
into the swing of it, rocks us to sleep. Some people see the 
effect of rhythm not merely in a comparatively quick move- 
ment, as in walking or rowing, but in anj- monotonous repeti- 
tion, even that of a daily routine; and it is certain that 
the mind becomes easily reconciled to the half somnolent 
condition which monotony in any form is able to produce. 
We talk of being tired of routine, but more people dread 
getting away from it. It also is a sort of drug. It is the 
soothing influence of rhythm that through the long centuries 
has made monotony bearable to those who have had to 
walk or row all day, or knit or spin or tend the loom. So 
important is this function that some people find in it the 
biological explanation of the rhythmic instinct. 

Thus rhythm is a narcotic, putting the keener sensibilities 
to sleep, shutting off the higher mechanism and leaving the 
rest of the machinery to run on without unnecessary wear 
and tear. And rhythm has through the possession of this 
property saved millions of toilers from death by slow tor- 
ture, and has been a great blessing to the race. When the 
end has been decided on and the road stretches far ahead, 
it is a boon to have this good fairy descend, wrap us m her 



156 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

cloud, and carry us through as in a sleeping car. It is 
well that the captain can sometimes set the course and go 
to sleep. 

A drug, it is true, has always its dangers, often commen- 
surate with its advantages — especially when it carries the 
blessed power of oblivion : the putting to sleep of the higher 
faculties is sometimes a perilous proceeding. Alcohol, for 
instance, produces its characteristic effects not chiefly as a 
stimulant but as an anfiesthetic. We shall see when we 
consider the effects of rhythm at a later period of growth what 
these dangers are and how they may be lessened or avoided. 

If rhythm can kill time, it also made time for us in the 
first place ; or if not quite that, if it is not the very substance 
of time to us, it is our means of establishing a firm hold upon 
it — gives it thickness, weight, consistency, and enables us 
to deal with it as something having recognizable parts. 
Meter, measure, are our words for definite rhythm; and 
rhythm is the only measure of time that has a concrete mean- 
ing for our feelings; it alone gives us time units whose 
equality we immediately perceive. Rhythm has given us 
our whole arithmetic of duration, enabling us to think ahead 
and backward with some real measure of the distance, to 
chart the future and the past. It helps us to drive a peg 
into a given moment and know in an intimate way when 
it is coming or how long it has gone by. I believe, indeed, 
that rhythm is important in our way of recognizing units of 
any sort — that, to some people at least, even the measure- 
ment of space becomes most real when reduced to units of 
the time that the imagination takes to traverse it. 

There is a very important practical faculty which, if it 
should not be classed precisely as an application of the sense 
of rhythm, is at least closely allied to it and, as I believe, 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 157 

greatly assisted by the familiarity with time units acquired 
in rhythmic play. I mean the faculty of learning the accent 
of any physical act — especially of those in which momentum 
plays an important part. 

The faculty itself is certainly an important one. It is 
at the basis of every form of skill. You cannot be a good 
carpenter, blacksmith, pianist, you cannot row or paddle 
or play golf, until you have formed an accurate image in 
your mind of the time length and sequence of those motions 
of which the special skill consists. To learn how to do a 
thing is to train the mind and muscles not merely to the form 
of the required movement, but to its sw^ing and ictus. The 
skillful violinist foresees his stroke in its exact emphasis. 
The good batsman accents his swing at the ball with an 
extraordinary nicety before he makes it. Rightly to perform 
any physical act you must, as we say, first get the hang of 
it. You must know before you start just how it ought to 
feel, the rate at which the momentum should accumulate, 
and just where the stress of it should come. You cannot 
even feed yourself until you can thus feel beforehand what 
the temporal sequence of the movement is to be — you must 
get the tune of it in your head or your mouth and hand will 
not cooperate. The accent of any movement, once learned, 
can be impressed upon the lower nerve centers and its direc- 
tion passed on to them. But the accent must be possessed 
somewhere, or the movement cannot be efficiently performed. 

Especially is this true of the handling of tools of any 
sort — in the development of the wielding faculty spoken 
of in an earlier chapter. To be a master of any instrument, 
from a tack hammer to a battleship, you must have an in- 
timate sense of its weight and balance, of its rigidity, give, 
and timbre — what we call knowing the feel of it — reduced to 
terms of rhythm, so that you can foresee with accuracy the 



158 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

swing of the stroke or of the encounter with a wave. Even 
a child's learning to walk consists largely in acquiring a 
similar knowledge of his legs. 

The same thing is true of the handling of individuals or 
social groups. There is a psychological swing and balance 
— a rhythm, tempo, or motif — wrapped up in every 
temperament, a natural period of oscillation in every per- 
sonality, just as in every phj'sical structure that really holds 
together. If you push according to its law, you can get 
sway over it. If you strike the wrong note or work against 
the rhythm, you will not get far. 

There is furthermore a sense of climax, or rhythmic syl- 
logism, in many forms of skill, both physical and psychologi- 
cal, from snapping a whip (with me it was a towel mutually 
applied by comrades of the bath) to carrying a breastwork 
or an audience. The skating game of snap the whip is a 
joyful recognition of this fact. Climax is at the root of 
any enterprise which involves a supreme moment in which 
all the accumulated power should be let loose — in which, 
if the undertaking is of a social nature, the ordinary inhibi- 
tions are overcome and the unconscious resources of the 
participants released. Nobody is capable of social leader- 
ship who cannot feel in his bones the cumulative rhythm of 
the breaking wave. Hear Antony's rough sketch of his 
political campaign : 

And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge, 
With Ate by his side come hot from Hell, 
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice 
Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of war. 

The wave reaches its height at "monarch's," breaks at 
"Havoc," and you can see it rush as it lets slip the dogs of 
war. 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 159 

Rhythmic play contributes in several ways to this power 
of learning the accent of a given motion. There is undoubt- 
edly an unrhythmic way of feeling time, but as soon as you 
accurately imagine the temporal sequence of a given move- 
ment — as soon as you see time with features in it — you 
are at least getting near to rhythm. There may not, in a 
given physical action, be rhythm in the sense of a repetition 
of equal units, but there is a balance of one period against 
another, like the balance of a line or of a physical body; 
and the acquiring of an accurate sense of this balance is an 
act implying measurement. The practice of rhythm, with 
its division of time into equal units, furnishes perhaps 
the frame and calculus by which we unconsciously plot 
the different curves and measure the varying rates of speed. 

Children, in rhythmic play, do not merely learn the 
accurate sequence of the motions they go through, but the 
character of each motion is prescribed by the especial em- 
phasis of the tune it goes to. The music tells how each 
step should be accented as well as when it should be made. 
Rhythmic play, in fact, with its constant association of 
time units with muscular action, familiarizes them with 
the whole subject of the relation of time and motion, and 
gets them used to judging temporal distances, just as the 
running and dodging games teach them to judge distances 
in space. Rhythmic play is the play of the timing faculty. 
It makes Father Time himself a playfellow, and the children 
get to know him as you can only know a person when you 
play with him. 

Consideration of the social importance of climax brings 
us to a function of the rhythmic instinct through which it 
has been of inestimable service to mankind, namely, that of 
social fusion. Rhythm is the great get-together agent of 



160 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the world, the mightiest ally of the belonging instinct. It 
is essential even to physical cooperation of the closest sort. 
I found this out when learning to jump a horse. I landed, 
uniformly and with precision, just behind his ears, until I 
learned the rhythm of the motion and could foresee it with 
some accuracy before it started. You cannot get a big 
trunk into a cart or a dory down the beach ; you cannot go, 
in anything, beyond what one man, or a succession of men 
acting severally, can accomplish, — except as you idduce 
the Muses to act with you. 

When the act of cooperation is of the repeating sort, the 
importance of rhythm is yet more marked, as all rowers 
know, and as the hundred old chantys of the rope-hauling 
days of sail navigation testify. Stroking a crew is much like 
leading an orchestra. The Argonauts required Orpheus to 
make them swing together, and from that day to this the 
turning out of a winning crew has been largely a musical 
achievement. 

And the psychological combination is the most important 
part of the effect. Orpheus makes of his crew not merely 
one body but one soul, and has such power that even the 
beasts and the trees obey him. The regiment keeps time 
not only with its feet but with its heart. A heart is born 
to it — a soul shared by its individual members — as it 
marches. Rhythm is the social alchemist, who can fuse 
individual minds and temperaments into one substance 
in obedience to his spell. 

As a question of the mechanics of the process, there is 
nothing that produces such identity of thought and feeling, 
and such consciousness of it on the part of each. When 
people sing or march or dance together, each knows with 
accuracy, as in the ring game, what all the rest are doing 
and are going to do and in great part how they feel about 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 161 

it ; and each knows that the other knows — and so on ; to 
the depth that the song or movement goes the mutual under- 
standing is complete. And it goes deeper as the rhythmic 
influence continues — a ripple, a wave, a ground swell, 
until the whole emotional being of each member of the com- 
pany swings to the same pulsation like a tidal wave. 

Historically the service of rhythm to social fusion has 
been very great. It is no accident that dance and song are 
the invariable accompaniment of the ring game. It was so 
from the beginning. From the first tribal dance down to 
the latest political demonstration, wherever men have 
sought to fuse their individualities into a common will and 
consciousness, they have instinctively turned to rhythm as 
the power that could perform the miracle. 

The war dance and the war song have served for hundreds 
of centuries to break down the cold barriers of individualism 
and weld young men into those victorious bands that 
insured the physical survival of the race and have established 
the ascendency of successive peoples. The religious dance, 
culminating in the religious orgy, was a very early social 
function and has lasted to our day. Ancient religion was 
tribal, always a community affair. And it was with the aid 
of religious ceremonies, with their songs and dances, that 
the persona of the family was enlarged to include the village, 
the tribe, and the city : it was in great measure through 
rhythm that political communities were formed. In reading 
accounts of the ways of savages one feels indeed that almost 
the whole of primitive social life was set to rhythm. 

And it is partly so to-day. Every college has its song or 
yell — the two species of vociferation are not always dis- 
tinguishable. Every successful nation, church, fraternity, 
has its anthem or its rhythmic ritual. Almost every great 
social movement has been set to music, from the musike 

M 



162 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of the Greeks to modern rag-time, and from Luther's hymn 
to the Carmagnole. Think what the Marseillaise stands 
for. The story of fhythm has almost been the story of 
civilization. It has even been suggested — by rowing 
enthusiasts, I presume — that there is significance in the 
fact that the great rowing nations, the peoples of the iEgean, 
of the Baltic, of the German Ocean, with their training in 
rhythmic cooperation, have been the great democratic 
nations of the world. 

Rhythm presents to people in warm and vivid feeling 
their common soul. A march or chorus is a real though 
transient commonwealth. It gives for the moment a fore- 
taste of what the end will be — illumines the intention, 
establishes the color, gives immediate experience of the en- 
largement of personality to include a social whole. 

Rhythm has the power of kindling the social imagination. 
It enables people to project forward a given purpose with 
that warmth and reality that make it feasible. It arouses 
in preeminent degree that sense of imminence — that actual 
presence of an impending act here in the passing moment — 
that renders its execution possible and at last inevitable. 
Rhythm is the vivid form of purpose — or rather it gives 
to purpose warmth and momentum even before it has a 
form. It gives to pale intention, provisionally, the reality 
of accomplished fact. It borrows of the future, presents 
us with a finished act at the beginning to defray the sacrifices 
of its own accomplishment. 

The adoption of song and rhythmic motion in the ring 
game show^s the ancient partners, rhythm and the team sense, 
at their time-honored and momentous work. These two, 
that have built up all the tribes and nations of the world, 
still pursue their joint vocation in our children's games. 
We speak of political rings and social circles ; the ring game 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 163 

is the second circle through which the citizen, or belonging, 
instinct extends, as the family circle is the first. It is of 
vital interest to the State that its children be given full 
opportunity to form these infant commonwealths and to 
sing and dance themselves into the spirit of them. 

As to the particular story or drama to be enacted in the 
ring games, the children themselves are not particular so 
long as they have the two essentials, the circle and the dance 
and song. The dramas of love, or of trades or household 
occupation, even of medieval mythology, which the tradi- 
tional ring games represent, are survivals of grown-up games 
and dances. There is opportunity here — which Froebel 
has so well made use of — to select those stories which we 
think most worth telling and to eliminate those that are 
stupid or convey an undesirable suggestion. 

The Greeks founded their education on rhythm in its 
various forms — musike as the}^ called it. The Italians of 
the Renaissance were rhymers, decorators, students of the 
Greek masters and their Latin imitators. Milton gives a 
high place to music and poetry in education, believing that 
the pupils in his model school, at the time of rest before 
meat, "may both with profit and delight be taken up in 
recreating and composing their travail'd spirits with the 
solemn and divine harmonies of music heard or learnt; 
either while the skillful organist plies his grave and fancied 
descant, in lofty fugue, or the whole symphony with artful 
and unimaginable touches adorn and grace the well-studied 
chords of some choice composer; sometimes the lute, or 
soft organ-stop, waiting oh elegant voices either to religious, 
material, or civil ditties ; which, if wise men, and prophets 
be not extremely out, have a great power over dispositions 



164 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

and manners, to smooth and make them gentle from rustic 
harshness and distemper'd passions." 

It was in the poems of Schiller and the symphonies of 
Beethoven that German nationality was achieved. The 
fatherland lived in these before her political institutions were 
bent to correspond. War and statesmanship merely ratified 
what rhythm had already done. And the power that built is 
still there to sustain its work. A friend of mine only yester- 
day heard a German say, after listening to one of their 
civic choruses, "Germany will never be conquered while 
Germans sing like that." 

To many people education by rhythm appears unpractical. 
The demand of business men is often for boys who can spell 
and add and have no nonsense in them : the less education 
beyond that of a machine, and the less fool poetry and 
aspiration the machine has in it, to get into its bearings 
and interfere with its smooth action, the better. What is 
the use of rhythm in business affairs? People who feel 
and talk in this way always have, for some reason, the curious 
obsession that they are very practical. But are they really 
so? Were the Greeks, or the Italians of the Renaissance, 
less successful than others in living a life that posterity 
can value and bequeathing permanent acquisitions to man- 
kind? Merely as a matter of business, are the Germans 
falling so rapidly behind in neutral markets as to indicate 
some fatal flaw in their procedure? Are they not, on the 
contrary, universally recognized as the most successful 
business nation of the present day ? And yet the first and 
last word of German industrial education is patriotic ideal- 
ism ; and music is deep in the warp and woof of it. A soul, 
it would appear, is a not unimportant part in the human 
mechanism, even in business affairs. 

And if a soul were, as is sometimes thought, an encum- 



RHYTHM AND LIFE 165 

brance in business, and if it could be dispensed with like the 
tonsils or the appendix, would it even then be wise to let it 
atrophy ? Does success in business necessarily mean success 
in life? The efficient man, as we all know and really recog- 
nize — w^hatever in our irritation with humanitarians we 
may be led to say — is he who is efficient in saving his own 
life, who can effectively translate his soul into action. It 
makes no difference to you how far you go if j'ou leave your 
heart behind : in that case you may as well turn back and 
start again. What counts is not how far you travel, but 
how far you carry your ideal. The rest is merely the squirrel 
in the cage — motion, perhaps very hot and strenuous, but 
without progress. And rhythm is the method of the soul's 
progression, the natural manner — not indeed the ruling 
motive, but the gait and habit — of the human spirit, its 
way of proceeding toward its end. As Emerson said, even 
our practical pursuits "must sing and soar." To deny 
the child the exercise of his rhythmic instinct is to send him 
hobbled out to run his race. 



BOOK IV. THE BIG INJUN AGE 
CHAPTER XXII 

THE HUNGER FOR REALITY 

There comes a day, when your boy is about six years 
old, when he suddenly loses interest in dramatic play. He 
doesn't want to be a mother bird. He won't hop like a 
toad. The stick ceases to be a gun ; walking in a peculiar 
way no longer makes him a soldier, and there is not a single 
pirate in the house. He kicks over his little sisters' houses, 
and to all suggestions that he take part in their accustomed 
play he returns scornful and unconciliatory response. He' 
says all these things are silly. Silly, indeed, is now his 
favorite word ; it is almost the earmark of this period : 
when he begins saying things are silly you may know that 
it is the beginning of the end. 

It is the same way with his sister when she reaches the 
same advanced and sophisticated age. The ship we built 
upon the stairs has dissolved into its component parts ; her 
doll is stuffed with sawdust, and all the illusions of her 
youth have disappeared. The sexes indeed are much alike 
throughout the period that now begins, — what I have 
ventured to call the Big Injun age. 

Thus the first symptom of the new age is disillusion. 
Imagination is no longer the same thing as reality. The 
child cannot be a lion or a full-rigged ship at will; a stick 
will not become a horse because he wants it to ; the donning 

166 



THE HUNGER FOR REALITY 167 

of his father's hat ceases to confer a medical degree. The 
joy has departed from these things. Indeed when the new 
spirit is upon him the child now shows a special aversion 
to dramatic play. He turns violently against those forms 
of occupation that have been hitherto his chief delight, 
showing especial scorn of whatever savors of make-believe. 
He even glories in his own sophistication about Santa Claus. 
Not that there will be no relapse. A child, however 
much he may be above that sort of thing in his more exalted 
moods, will continue to return at intervals to dramatic 
impersonation — even to playing doll or house — especially 
when the men of his own set are not looking, for many years 
after the new dispensation has commenced. But imper- 
sonation will no longer be his most serious pursuit. It will 
return in patches; he will revisit, frequently at first, the 
old enchanted ground of the imagination and renew the 
joys of his youth ; but such play will now be relegated to a 
subordinate position ; it ceases to bear the main burden of 
his growth. 

A second characteristic of this age is its sterility. Not 
only does the child turn against make-believe, but he some- 
times seems unable to find anything to take its place. A 
group of boys will stand about for hours on their favorite 
corner, debating "What let's do?" and throwing snowballs 
or well-worn and much valued jokes at the passers-by. 
Occasionally one will shy a stone at a bird or squirrel, while 
another will draw a channel with his toe to let the water 
run from one wheel track to another. Once in a while 
some one will suggest a game, to which all the others answer 
"Rats!" And unless haply there is in the company some- 
body with a special genius for mischief, the whole afternoon 
is likely to go by with nothing very much accomplished — 



168 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

nothing at least at all worthy of the physical and moral 
powers of the assembly, or satisfying to their restless desire 
to be doing something if they could only find out what it was. 

What games they do play if left wholly to themselves are 
apt to be desultory and spasmodic, and of a not especially 
exalted type. The present head of a successful boarding 
school, who for some years had charge of the play time of 
boys of the Big Injun age, once told me that the only thing 
they would keep on doing if left to themselves was to set 
on one of their number and tease him. That was the highest 
form of social institution they seemed able to support. 
This is the anarchistic age, the age of the individual, in which 
the critical faculty is so much stronger than the power of 
social organization as to almost always get the better of it. 

You think it was not so when you were a child, — in those 
days when there were real snowstorms and the fish always 
bit and there was something heroic going on every afternoon. 
And you think perhaps that it is not usually so with the 
country child. Perhaps it was not so in your case, especially 
if there were bigger boys to set the pace, or a strong and 
unbroken play tradition to grow up into. But if you will 
follow any set of children of this age about and note down 
what they are really doing, Wednesdays and Fridays and 
all, whether in the city or the country — even if you could 
have moving picture records of what you did yourself — 
you would find, I think, that there is, and was, less going on 
than you imagine. The big games and big snowstorms of 
forty years ago, like the lamp posts down the street, are 
near together; but in the present, wherever located, they 
are, and always have been, comparatively sparse. 

It is not that the child of this age is lazy or in the least 
contented with doing nothing. He does not desire to be 
idle. On the contrary, he is the most restless creature in 



THE HUNGER FOR REALITY 169 

the world. Not even the great American club man is more 
bored or discontented in his inactivity. Nobody could be 
more desirous of finding the thing, whatever it may be, 
that he truly wants to do. The child of the Big Injun age 
has been well likened to an engine with the steam up. But 
he is also an engine without a track, almost it sometimes 
seems without an engineer. He is not able, unassisted, to 
find occupation commensurate with his desires. 

What is the cause of these purely negative symptoms? 
What is behind the disillusionment and the sterility of the 
Big Injun age? Is the phenomenon all negative? Is the 
child going to die? Has the vital impulse spent itself and 
left him at the end of his physical and spiritual resources? 
No, it is not quite that. Parents and teachers will testify 
that there is plenty of life there — as much indeed as they 
are at times well able to handle. Whatever else the symp- 
toms may mean they at least do not signify a lessened 
energy. There is plenty going on inside the child at this 
stage of his existence, and he often succeeds in producing 
external symptoms which, whatever may be their other 
deficiencies, at least lack nothing in actuality. The persist- 
ence and high potential of the vital energy in him is attested 
by his supreme and varied troublesomeness. 

And this brings us to the great positive symptom of the 
coming of the Big Injun age, and the one that gives the key 
to all the rest. Why is it that when the child at this period 
of existence does think of something to do, you almost always 
wish he hadn't? How is it that he shows such unerring 
instinct for precisely the most inconvenient form of occupa- 
tion open to him, considering the resources at his command ? 
Why does he want to turn on the water, scratch the matches, 
play with the hind legs of the horse, sail the boat when he 



170 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

doesn't know how, find out whether it is loaded ? Why, in 
short, are the words mischief and small boy (or small girl 
either, for that matter) so closely and proverbially synony- 
mous? The question is one that has troubled the minds 
of many parents since Cain first demonstrated the activities 
of the Big Injun age, in connection with which his spirit is 
still so often raised. Some people have supposed that the 
enemy of mankind has peculiar access to the child at this 
stage of his development; and a good argument could un- 
doubtedly be made in favor of the supposition. Personally, 
however, I believe that the explanation is something differ- 
ent. I do not think the truth lies in the theory of pure 
cussedness nor in any negative supposition. 

What is at the bottom of the mischief of the Big Injun 
age, what has turned the child against dramatic play and 
left him for the time with no clear suggestion of what he is 
to do — the cause of all the surface indications — is a positive 
and not a negative phenomenon ; not a leaving off but a 
beginning. And it is the love of mischief that gives the 
clearest indication of its nature. It is precisely in this most 
annoying of all the symptoms he presents that we find the 
great and sufficient cause for hopefulness concerning the Big 
Injun, the key to his vast possibilities of growth. What has 
happened to him has been the coming into his life of a new 
desire — the overmastering desire for the real. The thing that 
has driven out make-believe is the passion for that which 
shall not be make-believe, the longing for objective truth, the 
hunger for hard pan. It is this insistent desire that is at 
the bottom of his love of mischief : the reason he has to do 
the most noisy, the most startling, the most inconvenient, 
thing is that it is also the most real. 

The child when the new spirit is upon him will not be 
contented with pretending things: like Orlando he can no 



THE HUNGER FOR REALITY 171 

longer live by feigning. He wants to come up against real 
life, real things, real obstacles. He wants to encounter 
real experience; and the more reality it ha-s the better. 
He loves the wetness of water even if he must fall into it 
to make sure : the heat of fire, though it should burn his 
fingers or supply one more perforation in his nether gar- 
ments. Trees are good to climb, stones to throw, grass to 
chew, or make a shrieking noise with. Almost everything 
is an object for close physical contact of some sort. The 
very ground is good to roll on and rub your nose in. Better 
rub your head on a brick, as a concrete study of architecture, 
than lack all bodily contact with the real. 

The child at this age is out for blood, out for big game, 
desirous to exploit the largest and concretest thing in sight, 
to get up next to it or make it happen. He loves a big 
noise, a big event, — especially to be the cause of such. 
The reason the things he finds to do are precisely the most 
troublesome ones within his reach is because these possess 
in preeminent degree the desired quality of realism. An 
alleviation to the cold blue morning bath, even when you 
had to break the ice in the pail to make it pour, was in the 
thunderous possibilities of the old-fashioned hat tub. Life, 
truth, reality, are the objects of passionate desire during 
the Big Injun age, and explain its leading characteristics. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE SKEPTIC 

The Big Injun age is on its intellectual side, as Froebel has 
told us, the age of exploration, when the child turns over 
every stone to see what is under it, climbs a tree to discover 
the strange countries lying beyond the garden fence, and 
when he goes to walk returns with mice and spiders and other 
weird and distressful specimens in his pockets. Boys like 
to take a bee line across country, not because they really 
think it is shorter, but because of the swamps and fences, 
gardens and chicken yards, "mosses, crossings, slaps, and 
stiles," and other perils and adventures it is likely to take 
them into. Every one knows that the many-counseled 
Odysseus did not really want to get home too easily; and 
the child is now at the Odysseus age. 

"I like boys, the masters of the playground and of the 
street, — boys, who have the same liberal ticket of admission 
to all shops, factories, armories, town meetings, caucuses, 
mobs, target-shootings, as flies have; quite unsuspected, 
coming in as naturally as the janitor, — known to have no 
money in their pockets, and themselves not suspecting the 
value of this poverty; putting nobody on his guard, but 
seeing the inside of the show, — hearing all the asides. There 
are no secrets from them, they know everything that befalls 
in the fire-company, the merits of every engine and of every 
man at the brakes, how to work it, and are swift to try their 
hand at every part ; so too the merits of every locomotive 
on the rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride with 

172 



THE SKEPTIC 173 

him and pull the handles when it goes to the enginehouse. 
They are there only for fun, and not knowing that they are 
at school, in the court-house, or the cattle-show, quite as 
much and more than they were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic 
class. 

" They know truth from counterfeit as quick as the chemist 
does. They detect weakness in your eye and behavior a 
week before you open your mouth, and have given you the 
benefit of their opinion quick as a wink. They make no 
mistakes, have no pedantry, but entire belief on experience. 
Their elections at baseball or cricket are founded oil merit, 
and are right. They don't pass for swimmers until they 
can swim, nor for stroke-oar until they can row : and I 
desire to be saved from their contempt. If I can pass with 
them, I can manage well enough with their fathers." Emer- 
son is still not only our greatest prophet but our best portrait 
painter. 

This is the age for collections — of bones, bugs, butterflies, 
and birds' eggs; of shells and stones and postage stamps; 
of coins and caterpillars, and of the punches that the differ- 
ent conductors make in your season ticket; the age of 
hoarding — a bone ring and a broken knife, a piece of agate 
and the bottom of a retired inkstand, an invalided castor 
and a static watch, a peacock's feather and a skunk's tail 
(imperfectly denatured though it be), with 

Eye of newt and toe of frog, 
Wool of bat and tongue of dog, 

and many other objects of recognized though mysterious 
virtue — even to the treasuring, by the highly favored, as 
Mark Twain records, of a dead rat with a string to swing it 

by. 

It is the age of things, when almost any object appears 



174 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

worthy of investigation, when the child's intellect, like his 
physical appetite, seems both omnivorous and unlimited, 
when 

The world is so full of a number of things 
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

Educators have, it is true, with wonderful perseverance and 
ingenuity, searched out or invented classes of facts — such 
as dates when nothing interesting happened, lists of kings 
and capitals, and the mummy of, say, the Third Punic 
War, 8th Period — that even a child of this age cannot 
assimilate ; and have thus both taught us something as to 
what does not contribute to his growth and shown that there 
is after all a selective principle at work in him. But this 
feat of the schoolmaster is a remarkable one ; there is hardly 
anything the child hears or encounters outside of school that 
does not interest him. 

This is especially the age of coming close to nature, not 
by way of book knowledge or platonic appreciation, not 
through lists of words with no experience behind them, 
but by sight and feeling, taste and smell, by entrance into 
the intimate society of all kinds of facts, establishing com- 
radeship with birds and beasts and waves and winds and fire 
and electricity. It is the age of making the personal ac- 
quaintance, through peace or war, of the squirrel, the chick- 
adee, and the neighbor's dog. The child of this age ought 
to be in the country. There is his world, the fulfillment 
of his prophetic curiosity, the assemblage of those objects 
and opportunities to which his instinctive interests relate. 
The summer tide of childhood should set away from cities 
to woods and farms and summer camps. There should be 
great extension of the country week, of expeditions to the 
beach and farm. And play provision should largely take 



THE SKEPTIC 175 

these forms. A city playground can successfully carry 
on a summer camp of its own from the middle of July to 
the end of August, when, among children over ten years 
old especially, activity on the playground is apt to lan- 
guish. And, to anticipate, playgrounds ought, for the older 
boys and girls, to have voyages of discovery and explo- 
ration and excursions preferably to places where they can 
get a swim. 

And if the child cannot be brought to the country, the 
country should be brought to him. Summer playgrounds 
for small children should be so far as possible in parks on 
the grass and under the shade of trees. It was formerly 
supposed that children killed the grass; but it has been 
demonstrated that, taken in moderate doses, they do not 
do so; and Keep off the Grass signs have been largely 
banished, so far as the smaller young ones are concerned, in 
civilized communities. Nor is there any need that play- 
grounds specifically so called should be hideous and devoid 
of growing things. Trees take very little room and are 
useful for goals and bases. We must think of the future a 
little and plant elm trees in all our children's corners; and 
in the meantime there can be shrubs. Children's gardens 
are not only valuable in themselves, as we shall see later, 
but help greatly to make the playground habitable. 

This is the age of dissection, investigation, first hand 
experiment, for puzzles and conundrums whether presented 
by nature or by man; the time to see what the doll's in- 
sides are made of, to locate the squeak in the baa lamb, 
to find what makes the wheels go round. It is the time to 
explore the gustatory properties of sorrel, of beech, spruce, 
or linden buds ; of seaweeds and grass pulled out of its stem, 
of ants, acorns, and various nuts ; the time of unlimited 
gorges at the currant bed or in the blueberry swamp, to 



176 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

say nothing of that disastrous day in which the raspberry 
was loved not wisely but too well, or of disappointing ex- 
periences with soap, horse chestnuts, and other objects 
presenting a fair outside. The small child is a convinced 
disciple of the laboratory method, testing things by fire 
and water and touch and taste and by getting up and jounc- 
ing on them. His mind is clearer and more empty than at 
any previous or succeeding age. He is the great skeptic, 
and therefore the great learner, of all time. 

Now is the time for kites and bonfires, fire engines and 
water wheels ; for baking clay, pouring lead, and seeing 
how rubber really smells when it is melted; for hunting 
and fishing and bird's-nesting. It is the time to smoke out 
the really interesting fact — see what you can do with 
things, or what they can be made to do, that is worth while 
— to get out of each its full reaction, the biggest event, 
crash, shriek, catastrophe, it has to give. 

The same investigating tendency exists in many of the 
higher animals. I have whistled back a deer who had come 
to feel that things were getting too personal and had re- 
treated into the woods from the solitary lake shore where 
we had been conversing. It is common to attract caribou 
by setting up a red flag on the ice. A healthy-minded 
chipmunk will come to his front door to investigate any 
unusual noise. Thus science for its own sake — which is 
the dress suit name for curiosity — is pursued by all of the 
broad-minded species. Especially is it cultivated among 
our near relations — so much so as to be accepted as a 
family trait. And the instinctive methods, namely im- 
personation and experiment, are the same in our humble 
relatives as in ourselves, and have indeed received their 
popular designation from this circumstance. The fact 
that, on our part, we first ape and then monkey may be 



THE SKEPTIC 177 

noted as showing the long descent and inevitable nature of 
our procedure. 

Children should have a vast variety of materials not 
merely to use in definite and foreseen waj^s, but to try 
experiments on. The passing of the woodshed and the 
old garret have been a loss to education, not compensated 
by anything that the sloyd room, the school laboratory, or 
the playground have yet provided. A truly educational 
environment contains not only sand and boards and blocks 
but old boxes and broken furniture, odds and ends of wood, 
nails, screws, tacks, staples, straw, tin, lead and iron, glue, 
paint, clay, sandpaper, things to cook with and means to 
explore the infinite variety of smells.^ The world has many 
faces; every substance has a trick and a language of its 
own, and the child is entitled to the whole vocabulary. 

It is not merely aptness in dealing with material things 
that is at stake; the child's whole future effectiveness 
depends in many ways upon that full comradeship with 
nature's world that comes from having grown up with nature 
as a playfellow. I have known a man to remain a square- 
toes all his life, partly as I believe from having dealt too 
exclusively in boyhood with things that could be handled 
neatly and with exactitude. He would be a better all-round 
man to-day if he had had more of a rollic with winds and 
waves and hay-cocks and dams made of slosh or gooey sods. 
Another man, perhaps, never built fires or took care of 
plants, and is oblivious to the growing power or contagious 
affinities in things. Another, who was brought up with 
boats and horses, is all intuition, but cannot build a good 
simple stupid pile of bricks. A boy should be at give and 
take with all sorts of material and with living things for the 
lesson in the infinitely varied language that nature speaks. 
* Stanley Hall has long taught this doctrine. 

N 



178 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Playing with fire is especially important. The nurturing 
of the baby flame, the coaxing of the embers back to life, 
the feeding of the growing blaze according to its power to 
assimilate — the whole process of unloosing the fire demon 
and controlling him — has educational value almost in pro- 
portion to its attraction. 

There is fun in touching ofiF any force and then sitting 
back and seeing things happen as you had planned. A 
favorite game I knew was setting many blocks on end in a 
series running up hill, down dale, and round corners, until 
at last the final block upset the balance of a tower with a 
heavy junk of soapstone at its head, whose fall furnished the 
joyfully foreseen catastrophe. 

This is the age of hospitality to mechanical laws, of joy- 
ful appreciation of the screw and pulley and inclined plane, 
of feeling the bite and cogency of levers, of sympathy with 
the kite and sail and windmill and with the parallelogram 
of forces, — not known as such, but intimately felt in action. 
The child likes to find how the camphor trunk, and even 
the big bureau, can be made to dance at the persuasion of a 
couple of blocks and a bit of joist with his small person on 
the other end. He will be lever-wise, feel and inwardly 
possess the compelling power of that method of applying 
force from that time on. 

A wheel has an endless fascination for the young. They 
seem almost to recognize its service as one of the great 
emancipators of mankind. To roll a hoop, a ball, a marble, 
a cart, or even to watch the coachman spin the carriage 
wheel as he washes it, is in itself a joy ; while a big wheel 
rolling down a hill, even though it finally gets away from you 
and makes the last hundred yards well under the world's 
record, to the imminent peril of traffic when it gains the 
street, represents an acme of exhilaration to be remembered 



THE SKEPTIC 179 

ever after. Half the joy in coasting, sailing a boat, 
riding a bicycle, is in the comradeship with natural forces. 
There seems, besides, to be almost a special instinct for the 
use of vehicles, as shown in the love of sleds, boats, toy 
carts, carriages, buckboards, steam engines, and automobiles. 

To watch the operation of a great machine gives every one 
a sense of satisfaction. It seems to fulfill our own will and 
bring us into cooperation with the universe. It satisfies 
the eternal element in our desire, as illustrated by Kipling 
in MacAndrews' hymn. The Big Injun age is the time to 
acquire an intimate sense of how the world forces operate 
and how they feel about it. 

Boats especially seem almost a part of the growing child. 
We are all of us a little web-footed ; our weaning from 
Mother Ocean has been not quite complete. As the child's 
hands have an affinity for sand and his feet for wading — 
both recognized on modern playgrounds — so has his heart 
for boats. He throws a leaf into the pond and watches it 
sail away. His nurse cannot drag him from the puddle 
on which his argosy of chips is once afloat. Children I 
knew used to put in about eight hours a day for weeks in 
sailing shells. Toy boats, making and sailing them, are the 
proper intermediate course. But being in a real boat your- 
self, and in control of it, is the true fulfillment. Boys push 
off on rafts made of two sleepers, with their complement of 
loose boards and sticks, to explore the Spanish Main ; there 
is no pond within walking distance of a town or village that 
has not seen its Armadas. I know a boy who started his 
experience in full control of a small skiff at five years 
old and of a sailboat at eight. And incidentally it is full 
control that counts — better first man on board of two 
sleepers and a barrel stave than second in command of 
the biggest battleship. You can learn more as captain 



180 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of a two-inch plank than as first mate of your father's 
schooner. 

The Big Injun age is in a peculiar degree the age of tools, 
of finding where Father keeps the hammer and saw and 
screw driver, and of going to work with them — if not on a 
boat or a soap box mansion then haply on the parlor furni- 
ture. If the chisel is missing, it is probably not the cat 
who has taken it. Be sympathetic with this hunger of the 
hand. Even if your hatchet should show the modifying 
effect of chopping lightning rods or your saw's teeth have 
been set on edge because your children have cut raw nails 
with it, be not too severe; in all experimental science the 
limitations of things have to be established by actual ex- 
periment. In any case, be well assured that no child can 
reach his normal growth without free access to the tool 
drawer. The tool is a part of Man, his normal complement, 
as intimate to his active being, as essential to its unfolding, 
almost, as the hand itself. The toolless man is maimed, 
truncated ; and the toolless boy is father to him. And the 
time for this growth is now when the hand hungers for it, 
when the sap is running toward this extension. The joint 
of tool and hand can never be made so well at any later 
period. 

Partly this necessary extension may be won by the han- 
dling of any sort of tool or weapon. A child who is merely 
hammer-wise or bat-wise or racket-wise has at least the 
rudiments of toolmanship. To some extent, however, it 
is the particular tool through which he is to find his life 
and utterance that must now be learned. Musicians say 
that the violinist should begin by the age of seven, and 
baseball men tell us that the batting eye must be acquired 
early. I believe that the stammering utterance of so many 



THE SKEPTIC 181 

of our modern artists is due to an imperfect, because too late 
acquired, joint with their tools, as though a man's tongue 
were to be put into his head after he was grown up. So 
far at least as to the use of edged tools practice should cer- 
tainly extend. The pocket knife is surely an integral part 
of the small boy. With this instrument he whittles his 
way from the stone to the iron age. And the same ought 
to be true of the small girl. 

The child's love of tools is not a mere desire to see what 
he can do with them — or does not long remain so. Very 
soon he wants to get results. The constructive impulse is 
not dead in him during the Big Injun age. It now finds 
expression not only in more elaborate and realistic play with 
sand or blocks, but in many other kinds of constructive 
work. Boys like especially to work in wood, whether their 
efforts take the form of whittling or of the use of carpenter's 
tools, and of course they like to make something that is of 
real use like a bat, a sled, a double-runner, a hut, or a box 
for tools. Children who before could never get on at school 
have been made over when given an opportunity at clay- 
modeling. If you can introduce some form of sloyd work 
in your summer school or playground, you will meet the true 
play impulse of the children more squarely, perhaps, than 
in any other way. There is often a chance on the playground 
to carry further than can be done in the classroom the funda- 
mental sloyd principle of reality. The small children will 
be glad to serve the state by carrying off stones and rubbish 
in their carts. The bigger ones can help to make benches, 
mend fences and backstops, shingle the roof of the shelter, 
or lay out football fields and diamonds. Boys are easily 
encouraged to make window-boxes for themselves and 
others. A boy that I knew did all the splicing for the 



y^ 



182 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

swings, and has since taken the course on the Massachu- 
setts nautical training ship and become a full-fledged sailor. 
In country places much more ambitious things can be ac- 
complished. In Andover, Massachusetts, Mr. George E. 
Johnson, in the best country vacation school I have heard 
of, had the boys first cut and haul the logs and then build 
the log cabin in which the school's final exhibition w^as held. 

This is also the time of social criticism and experimenta- 
tion. From the first number of Punch down to last week's 
edition of the comic papers, the small boy has been the 
disconcerting critic of men and things. He must be shown ; 
here as elsewhere his whole attitude is skeptical, demanding 
proof. 

The impulse to investigate social phenomena is a great 
factor in the love of mischief. What makes the small boy 
pull his little sister's hair is largely his desire to ascertain 
by actual experiment the exact nature, direction, and social 
value of the reaction to be thus obtained. It is in this Big 
Injun age that discovery is made of the special flavor of 
stolen fruit — clearly a social, not a chemical phenomenon — 
that surreptitious visits are made to the store closet, that 
one learns how to stand on one's head in the apple barrel 
and studies the most unostentatious method of testing the 
orchard of the old gentleman next door. There are several 
motives for following these and similar branches of endeavor, 
but one common to them all is the desire for social research. 
As a part of his business of testing all things to see what 
they most truly are — to ascertain by actual experience what 
William James would have called their cash value — the child 
is also testing you. He tries these various stimuli upon you 
to ascertain whether you too are real. And he is testing 
at the same time the social laws and institutions which you 



THE SKEPTIC 183 

represent. You say Don't pretty often ; he wants to find 
out which time you really mean it — just as he sticks pins 
into his companions in order to determine by actual experi- 
ment where they really live. He finds that you — even you, 
the American parent — will not, as a rule, allow him to put 
his feet on the tablecloth or sail his boats in the soup. He 
wants to find how much further your effective personality 
extends. He is like the man who goes along the train at 
night when you are trying to sleep, striking every wheel 
with his hammer to see what kind of sound it will give forth. 

And it is important to him, in this connection, that you, 
the representative of the grown-up world, should not give 
forth an uncertain sound. Mischief is the outcropping of a 
healthy tendency, but it does not follow that all its mani- 
festations should be indulged, on the playground or else- 
where. On the contrary, to find in you a " mere, mush of 
concession" will falsify the child's reckoning and defeat the 
object of his search. If you look with bland and equal 
complaisance upon harmless exuberance and rough infringe- 
ment of the interests of property and order, he must inevi- 
tably conclude that the two are equally permissible. And 
it is interesting to observe that he will not be pleased by the 
discovery. He is like a man prodding in the snow to find the 
outline of the solid ledge. It will not answer his purpose to 
find that there is no ledge there. He cries perhaps when he 
burns his finger in the fire or falls through the ice, but he 
would not care to live in a world of water that was not wet, 
of fire that did not burn, or of institutions that were capable 
of no reaction. The child's search for reality in social 
matters must not be baffled by tampering with the buoys 
that society has placed to mark the shoals. 

Neither, on the other hand, must the tendency to mischief 
be merely snubbed. As an indication of the main current 



184 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

of his life it must be guided and made use of. A teacher, a 
leader of some sort, is as much a complement of the child 
at this stage of growth as the mother at an earlier period. 

This searching, criticizing attitude of the mind is the second 
phase of the one great instinct to know — that is, to search 
and organize our world — for which curiosity is too mean a 
name. It is the phase of experiment succeeding upon that of 
intuition. The dramatic age is the age of conceiving things 
as wholes, getting their general intention and idea. Now 
comes the time for finding their specific qualities. Nature 
seems to have assumed that the child will by this period of 
his growth have conceived, sufficiently for his present needs, 
the principal factors in his world — will know well enough 
how they feel from the inside and when they are at home 
— and that his great need now is to become acquainted 
with their practical use and limitations, to establish the 
frontiers and hard edges of the world that he will have to 
deal with. It is for this reason that she has implanted in 
him the necessity to scrape and bang himself against it with 
so passionate a desire to know, in most concrete and feeling 
way, exactly what it, and what he himself, is made of. 

The change from the dramatic to the Big Injun age is the 
most marked instance of a phenomenon that recurs through 
life. It is the same ascent, from a more complete but 
narrower world to the at first sight prosaic realities of a 
wider one, that occurs when, upon graduation from college, 
the revered captain of the university crew goes to work 
running errands for a broker's firm or shoveling coal at the 
dictation of a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive 
Engineers. Its counterpart in history is the passing away 
of the old regime with its glamour and its romance, its silks 
and satins, its gold lace and powdered wigs, its tinsel and 
its masquerade, at the awakening of a deeper life, though on 



THE SKEPTIC 185 

the surface a more barren and unattractive one. The fairy- 
land of childhood has grown pale before the clear light of 
dawn. Oberon and his train scent the morning air, dance 
their last circle around their little friend, and depart. They 
will come again in another form, but their time is not now. 
The child has to be a Hume before he can become a Kant, 
to pass through the age of cold, critical skepticism and 
disillusion before he can reconstruct his world upon a firmer 
basis. 

We call the investigating tendency in children a love of 
mischief. When they are grown up the same thing will be 
called science for its own sake. And all the while it is just 
the perennial instinct of curiosity, the instinct that insists 
on knowing— that would rather die than not have gone to 
the middle of Sahara or to the North Pole — that w^ould go 
to the back of the North Wind if that were possible — just 
to know what is there. It is the instinct that investigates 
the largest and the smallest, weighs the stars and makes 
the personal acquaintance of the microbe — partly, and 
professedly, for the useful results that may be gained, but 
chiefly and more truly for the sheer love of finding out. 

The child, it is true, is not coldly scientific: no true 
scientist is. Both in its boisterous and in its sympathetic 
expressions his camaraderie with Nature, won during the 
dramatic age, survives. He feels akin, beneath the surface 
antagonisms, with all he meets, and wrestles with Dame 
Nature in the conviction that she too enjoys the game. 
His exploring, investigating, testing, collecting, is the entrance 
of Man the Knower into his kingdom. Fire, water, tools — 
with edges to them — plants, animals, the sea, the earth, 
the air, and all that in them is, are his — even the starry 
heavens are his — if he can find their secret. And to such 
conquest he is predestined by the invincible desire of his soul. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

BIG INJUN 

Of all his quest for reality during the Big Injun age the 
child's most passionate search is in himself. He wants to be 
somebody and to be aware of it. It is for this reason that he 
is so obsessed to weigh and measure himself against all kinds 
of obstacles, and especially against his own companions. 
He secretly doubts his own judgment and wishes to be 
convinced by outside evidence, to see himself as real in others' 
eyes. He seeks the testimony of his contemporaries not alone 
because these are his natural rivals, but also because they 
are his severest judges and least corruptible. The child of 
this age wants to impress others, to let the universe know 
that he is here ; but his deep desire, behind all other objects, 
is to convince himself. 

It is above all for this absorbing purpose of establishing 
his reality in his own mind that the child has abandoned 
make-believe. He turns from defeating the Spaniards 
in that hard-earned victory in which he led the advance while 
his little sister had charge of the rear guard, to the more 
difficult task of defeating Billy Jones in single combat — 
partly, it is true, from sheer fighting instinct, but partly also 
because he believes in Billy Jones and knows that he can get 
from him a true report as to his own real value. Games 
are now uniformly competitive. A year, a few months, ago 
they were largely cooperative and dramatic ; but now the 
question is who is the better man, or the greater and more 
enviable in some respect. 

186 



BIG INJUN 187 

We all know the sort of conversation that goes on. "I 
can run faster than you can." " I can jump higher than you 
can." "I can climb higher, dive deeper, and come up 
drier than you can." "My father knows more than your 
father." "My uncle is richer than your uncle." "My big 
brother can lick your big brother." He may not have a big 
brother, but he will stick to it just the same ; for at this period 
it is a rule of life that no inferiority shall be admitted in any 
manifestation or accessory of greatness, of whatsoever sort. 
The power of unblushing assertion, so valuable in business 
and social life, receives its first development at this tender 
age. Such and such like are the preliminary pleadings by 
which the final issue gets defined. There is no sort of 
attribute that is not made subject of emulation. Preemi- 
nence is even claimed by him whose feet are larger or his nose 
snubbier than the rest. Readers of that dreadful story 
"Sentimental Tommy" will remember that when the other 
boy alleged that his father had been to a hanging, Tommy 
promptly replied, "It was my father that was hung." It 
is true that the fighting instinct is a powerful factor in this 
sort of dialectic and the many forms of contest that it ushers 
in. But the need of ascertaining personal values by actual 
measurement in the most applicable scales is also strongly 
present. 

But the child wishes not only to find whether he is real, 
but to prove that he is so : not merely the ascertaining but 
the assertion of the fact is the object of his desire. Perhaps 
the same is true of his whole search for reality — that he 
purposes not merely to discover his world, but to create it. 
Such at all events is his impulse as regards himself ; his heart 
is set upon making actual the original motions of his soul ; his 
inclusive desire is, in our accurate phrase, to "assert himself," 
to aflBrm in most dogmatic form his own reality. In their 



188 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

entirety, indeed, the child's instincts, now as ever, are the 
conscious promulgation in his mind of the law of the growing 
thing; his obedience to them is simply the process of the 
birth of man. But at this period the conscious form of the 
impulse is that of a self to be expressed. The constituting 
instincts are tied up in a bundle labeled "I." It is I against 
the world — a personality to be wrenched free, and outwardly 
projected in the real. The child identifies himself with the 
forces welling up within him and finds his life in their ex- 
pression — or perhaps we should say these underlying forces 
burst into individual consciousness as the child and claim 
in him their right of utterance. Inspiration is of that par- 
ticular syllable in the race life which it is his peculiar mission 
to pronounce. And the form of the commandment is toward 
outward and visible expression, the concrete demonstration 
of himself. 

In short it is the inclusive instinct to live, to be somebody 
in the ethical as well as in the physical sense, that dominates 
the Big Injun age and determines its most salient charac- 
teristics. 

The child's self-assertion is crude, clumsy, objectionably 
loud. And it must be so. The spirit cannot spring to full 
life at once. Purposes do not come to any of us ready- 
made, but are born of obedience to the first dim hints of in- 
spiration, hardly more than a pain at first, an uneasiness — a 
need to arise and go forth, not knowing whither we go. Such 
is the first coming of the spirit even in grown men. And in 
the small child, to whom the conscious need of self-assertion 
has newly come, a smooth and perfect presentation, or even 
knowledge of his own purposes, is wholly impossible. In 
his anxiety to speak out, to assure himself that it is his own 
voice and not another's, he is often noisy and rough, and is 
apt to be annoying to his elders, whose constant effort is to 



BIG INJUN 189 

suppress him — an effort harmless enough if care is taken 
that it be not too successful, furnishing, indeed, a convenient 
obstacle against which the child may find and exercise his 
powers. 

With the child meantime it is crude expression or none at 
all.' To be or not to be ; to blurt out what he has it in his 
heart to say, with the almost certainty of being misunder- 
stood, or to shrink back, shun the risk, and assume yet a 
little longer the smug and harmless little boy, commended of 
his maiden aunts : that is the question his soul puts to him. 
It is the question of accepting or flinching from the throe of 
birth ; now is the moment of becoming, the passion of the 
budding soul. Shall the leaf be put forth, or shall one more 
opportunity go by, one more item be omitted from the 
final stature of the man he should have been ? What moves 
in him is the instinct to be alive, to realize the law that 
Nature placed in him. It is the same power that makes the 
flower grow, the oak stir within the acorn. If he did not 
burst forth in rough and uncouth ways of speech and action, 
he would never authentically act at all, but must forever 
remain a life unrealized, a recreant to his informing soul. 

Outwardly what the child seeks through all his contests 
and all the mischief that he does is to show his own impor- 
tance. He wants to prove himself a devil of a fellow, a power 
to be reckoned with, a bold, bad man whom it is unsafe to 
cross. "Let them not go too far," "A time will come," and 
similar declarations of the stage villain or stage hero (it 
makes little difference which) are all congenial to his state of 
mind. He wants to make the world sit up and take notice 
in order that he in turn may take notice of its sitting up. If 
he accomplishes the latter result, by whatever method, he 
feels that his efforts have not been in vain. 

In order to obtain an outside and unbiased view of the 



190 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Big Injun attitude of mind I once, at considerable personal 
sacrifice, made a study of the five-cent magazines that are 
sold to children, named for the most part after famous 
characters of life or fiction whose wonderful adventures they 
narrate. The purpose of the publishers is, I suppose, not 
primarily philanthropic ; their productions are undoubtedly 
meant to sell; and they do sell if one may judge by the 
number of them that exist. To that end they have to please 
the children who are their purchasers. And they do this, 
doubtless, by telling them what they want to hear. They 
hold not indeed a mirror up to nature, but a mirror up to the 
child's dearest desire — the desire for acknowledged great- 
ness in himself. A study of these magazines is a study of the 
child as he would like to be, and has a special interest on 
that account. 

The very first number that I read contained adventures fit 
to satisfy the most exacting. The hero starts out in the 
morning to attend a clambake. When he arrives near the 
appointed place a masked ruffian jumps out from behind a 
tree and points a pistol at his head. The boy, with a certain 
easy grace, knocks down the masked ruffian and is about to 
pull off his mask when he is interrupted by terrible screams 
coming from the direction of the beach. He rushes through 
the trees just in time to see one of the girls of the party about 
to be killed by a bull ; puts the bull out of business by the 
simple process of shooting out his eyes with the pistol which 
he had just taken from the masked ruffian; and then ex- 
plains in a few well-chosen words to the owner of the bull, 
who appears upon the scene in some excitement, that the 
bull has been making a nuisance of himself and had to be 
restrained. Then, immediately after a hearty meal of pie 
and doughnuts, he very appropriately takes part in a swim- 
ming race. He is just about to win the race by rounding the 



BIG INJUN 191 

mark inside of his hated rival, when the masked ruffian, 
accompanied by another masked ruffian, turns up in a dory 
and begins batting him over the head with an oar, — that is 
to say, they try to hit him, but every time the masked ruffian 
strikes the hero dives and comes up on the other side of 
the boat; until at last the masked ruffian gets on to his 
rhythm and hits him just as he comes up. He then goes 
down plump upon the bottom and would have drowned if he 
had not been rescued by his defeated rival in the swimming 
race. These however are only the introductory proceedings 
— a few little preliminary stunts leading up to the real climax 
of the day, which comes in a ball game in the afternoon. 

Now that, I suppose, is a boy's idea of passing an agree- 
able forenoon, his notion of a pleasant routine, the sort of 
thing his daily life would be if he could have the arranging 
of it. 

It is because of this predilection for demonstrated greatness 
that I have ventured to call this the Big Injun age — the age 
in which the child wants to be Big Injun, to show himself 
great and glorious and to be acknowledged as such. The 
cigarette is I think in some sort the equivalent of the paint 
and feathers, the scalps and claws of grizzly bears, affected 
by the original Big Injun. Boys smoke not wholly from any 
pleasure which they may derive from the experience, but 
largely to be seen to smoke — though there may be a choice 
as to who sees them. 

There appears indeed to be a special instinct to show off, 
to shine and make one's self feared, admired, and envied, to 
establish a triumphant social personality. And this desire 
sometimes carries children to extreme lengths both of law- 
lessness and of heroism. But the desire to show off is not 
the whole of the self-assertive impulse nor the strongest 
part of it. No boy will be really satisfied by making people 



192 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

think he can do things, if conscious in his own heart that 
he cannot do them. Indeed Big Injun truth gives even 
Big Injun fiction a close race for it. I remember one time 
when the Sportsman's Show was in Boston a part of it was 
the performance of a man who dove from a platform fifty 
feet high into a small trough. The man gave his exhibition 
in the presence of a large audience, and was presumably paid 
for doing so. But one afternoon two boys, not seeking 
publicity, but rather shrinking from it, waited in the gallery 
until the people had gone out, and then climbed forth upon 
the man's lofty perch and dove into his bath tub, gaining 
no extrinsic reward for their performance except a wet walk 
home to South Boston and a possibly unsympathetic recep- 
tion when they reached there. The motive was the exercise 
of a higher degree of daring than most boys, or most other 
people, possess. Deeper always than the desire to impress 
others is the child's longing to convince himself; his own 
reality is still the dearest object of his search. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE FIGHTING INSTINCT 

The impulse to wrestle and punch each other is strong in 
children, especially small boys, from a very early age, and 
is the basis of much play of the roly-poly sort. Like the 
corresponding instinct in young puppies, it implies no ill will, 
but quite the contrary, and is indulged in without hostile 
intent. The fighting instinct, indeed, is never really malevo- 
lent ; its aim is not to bring evil on the adversary, but to 
fight and overcome him. Among the Irish, in whom the 
instinct is especially vigorous, fighting is properly, like 
dancing and conversation, a social function. Mr. Dooley's 
description of mental depression as a feeling " as if ye hadn't 
an inim.y in the whole weary world" is expert testimony to 
the genial nature of the impulse. The notion existing among 
Latin nations that the object of fighting is to kill your ad- 
versary is foreign to the better interpretation of it — what 
is the use of an enemy when he is dead? The pistol and 
stiletto are instruments not for fighting, but for putting an 
end to it. 

The fighting instinct, it is true, when thoroughly aroused, 
induces acts that often result in death. There sometimes, 
indeed, supervenes the definite desire to kill. But I cannot 
think that such desire is of the real essence of the fighting 
spirit. One does not picture Hercules or Roland as slaves 
of the blood lust or wishing evil to their adversaries, even 
though it may become necessary, in the course of business, 
o 193 



194 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

or in the interests of art, to put an end to them. Certainly 
to King Arthur and his knights, as presented by Sir Thomas 
Malory in the days when fighting was still the serious occu- 
pation of a gentlemen, the slaying of an adversary was the 
very last thing to be desired ; he was a great deal too useful 
as a whetstone of valor and a witness to its effects to be wasted 
in any such careless way. There is often in a serious fight 
a vindictive sense, a desire to punish. Of course there is a 
desire to win. But there is not necessarily a desire to harm. 
Ill will to opponents, even in war, is found not among the 
soldiers, but in the stay-at-homes. 

Actual fighting among children (or adults either) is not 
agreeable to witness nor for the weaker side to take part in. 
But the instinct itself is so deep in the race, and carries within 
it such a valuable element of character, that it ought to be 
guided and encouraged, not repressed. Unwillingness to 
fight on due occasion is perhaps the severest of all moral 
handicaps ; while on the other hand the fighting quality is 
of the bed rock of human character. 

And fighting, like all the major instincts of human nature, 
serves not only its narrower and more primitive purpose, 
but is protean in its manifestations. The instinct has eaten 
back into our nature until it has colored our whole being and 
issues in an infinite "variety of forms. Men fight disease, ill 
fortune, failure, their own temptations, as well as enemies of 
flesh and blood. It is the same dour quality which receives 
its first development in fisticuffs that refuses to see defeat 
in any enterprise. It is largely the fighting spirit that has 
supported the martyr and the missionary, from Stephen the 
Roman legionary down to the fighting Quakers and Tran- 
scendentalists who officered the negro regiments in our Civil 
War. You may not trace the pugilism in the later stages of 
the martyr's life, but the hard kernel of character is still there. 



THE FIGHTING INSTINCT 195 

The polliwog's tail does not look much like a pair of legs, but, 
as Stanley Hall has shown, a polliwog whose tail has not been 
allowed to develop will never have the legs he was entitled 
to. From defeating the village bully to the Second Inaugural 
is a long journey, but the Generous Conqueror is there in 
both achievements. 

But whatever it may develop into, the first incarnation 
of this great spirit is pugilistic. The god appears first as 
Mars or Thor or Hercules. His lessons are fierce and hard 
to learn, but they must be learned as he prescribes them if 
you would have his help. And the time to learn them, as in 
all like cases, is when they are set by nature — beginning, 
in this instance, at the age of six or thereabouts. Its first 
years are often a crucial time in the development of this in- 
stinct. It is a sort of maidenliness, rather than the lack of 
innate courage, that overlays the martial spirit in the people 
of a peaceful age. As a clever French writer has said, 
the trouble with good people is that they are such awful 
cowards. But the disability is not inevitable ; the peaceful 
yeoman or civilian has pretty regularly defeated the aristo- 
crat or professional fighter at his own game whenever he has 
found it worth while to take it up in earnest and has, in 
material equipment, possessed a fighting chance. His 
initial difficulty comes through neglect to train the instinct 
when it presents itself. Civilized people lose the use of the 
quality through its systematic suppression, or insufficient 
opportunity, at the age when it calls for utterance. 

I do not mean that we should go to the opposite extreme 
and, like the Spartans or the old-fashioned English boarding 
school, encourage mere savagery among our boys. A society 
of bulldogs or unlicked bears is too expensive an escape from 
cowardice. There should on the contrary be the insistent 
teaching of chivalry, consideration for the weak, respect for 



196 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the defeated, sympathy even for the big and clumsy ones 
who are such easy game. Yet on the other hand the boy 
who is timid ought somehow to be taught to break the ice 
and to make the discovery, so important to his future welfare, 
that he also has fight in him, and that defeat itself is a victory 
within the reach of all and worth far more than it costs. 

The expression of the fighting instinct among children, 
however, covers a far wider field than that of actual fighting. 
With the impulse of self-assertion, it is a constant ingredient 
in the obsessing desire for contest that is so strong a charac- 
teristic of the Big Injun age. As the child emerges from the 
roly-poly phase of the dramatic and immediately post- 
dramatic period the desire for contest becomes both stronger 
and more generalized and shows itself in an almost infinite 
variety of play. The form of competition is, however, seldom 
of a dry abstracted sort. As in all the arts and all the forms 
of play, the favorite expression seldom rests upon a single 
instinct. Children will occasionally take part in an im- 
promptu race, " Here to the corner — one-ter-three-go ! " — ■ 
but there is not enough real life in such a contest to hold 
their interest very long. The issue must be something more 
significant; superiority must be shown in the accom- 
plishment of some otherwise desirable end. Not merely 
running faster, but catching or getting away; not merely 
throwing straighter, but hitting a mark, preferably a live 
one — as for instance your competitor himself or the hat of 
some innocent third party; not lifting a greater weight 
but lifting your antagonist off his feet and depositing him 
gently in the snowdrift — such are the preferred forms of 
contest, combining the satisfaction of some other instinct — 
of chasing, hitting a mark, or personal encounter — with that 
of competition pure and simple. 



THE FIGHTING INSTINCT 197 

Or competition may take the indirect form of doing stunts 
— climbing to a branch or window where the rest dare not 
follow, making a higher dive, swallowing a more repulsive 
object. But, with stunts also, continued interest depends 
upon the sort of thing achieved. There will be less glory 
for the hero who threads the finest needle than for the one 
who jumps the widest brook. 

But always most popular of all is that form of contest 
which satisfies the social instinct, in which every one takes 
part, in which, through many episodes, effort is directed 
toward some momentous end — tagging "gool" or getting 
back to gool untagged, freeing or holding prisoners, getting 
safe across a dangerous territory. In short, the favorite 
form of contest is the game, and competitive games are 
accordingly the favorite play of the Big Injun age. 

All the games of this age are competitive, and all I shall say 
of them in other chapters is part of a description of Big 
Injun competition. But there are certain general charac- 
teristics of competitive play that should be spoken of. First : 
the fighting instinct, though its coming is comparatively 
sudden, does not appear in its full strength all at once. 
The competition of the earlier part of this age has large 
elements of fooling and of sheer physical exuberance. The 
games are still very roly-poly and informal, and ought to be 
so. "Nature makes no jumps;" a child does not become 
fiercely competitive all at once. Competition, like any 
impulse, appears first dimly and in the soft, and hardens 
gradually. It is accordingly a great pity that children of 
the Big Injun age in our cities are so much under the in- 
fluence of their older brothers — who in turn are too much 
led by the newspapers and by grown-up opinion — so that 
they think the only games worth the serious attention of a 
young man of seven or eight years old are baseball and foot- 



198 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

ball as played by the professional or college teams. The 
greatest specific need of American play life at the present 
time is the revival on a national scale of the informal, happy- 
go-lucky, laughing, fooling, loosely organized games like three 
deep, hill dill, old man on the castle, puss in the corner, 
and, as a halfway station toward the solemnities of the major 
games, some form of prisoners' base. It is a good thing to 
be foolish in the right place, and surely there is no righter 
place for foolishness than wherever you happen to be when 
you are seven years old. 

Second : there is the one-game tendency. The early, 
more informal, competition of this period is dispersed among 
many games ; small children often invent new ones for them- 
selves, or sometimes change to a different game every few 
days. But as the Big Injun spirit intensifies and competition 
becomes more keen, — a development which continues far 
into the next age, though then in subordination to a mightier 
instinct, — the games become more set and definite, and 
their number greatly lessens, until in any one group there is 
at any given time some one game that monopolizes attention. 
The child may still indulge in other sports of a subordinate 
nature — the amusements of his lighter moments, avoca- 
tions in which he will occasionally unbend; and such 
should be encouraged on every playground, especially for 
those not yet proficient in the ruling game. But for the 
majority the main business of life — the real work on which 
you engage on your way to school, in recess, on the way 
home, during the afternoon, and after supper — will be the one 
especial game which happens just then to be in the ascendant. 

It has been many times remarked that the morning the 
first boy plays marbles you will see a hundred others, though 
there was not one the day before. The same is true of the 
first top and the first baseball, — and so throughout the year. 



THE FIGHTING INSTINCT 199 

The cause of this extraordinary unanimity, as of the whole 
one game tendency, is I suppose partly in the instinct of 
imitation ; but there is also a deeper reason. Sir Thomas 
Malory tells of a knight who was noted for killing dragons 
and strange monsters, but was not much good at overcoming 
other knights. Now a boy has no use for a knight whose 
talent is of that sort. He does not care to excel in the game 
that nobody else is playing. His soul can find satisfaction 
only in winning, or making a place for himself, in the game 
that everybody plays. His reason is the same that turns 
the American man toward business. We do not care for 
walk-overs. In England politics may be the game ; in Ger- 
many it may be science. Here it is running mills and banks 
and railroads, and those are accordingly the pursuits that 
have attraction for the strong. So with our boys it is base- 
ball, not polo, golf, or fancy riding, or any game that is not 
being generally played, that represents real life. 

Another reason why those who supervise children's play 
should seek, during each season of the year, rather to give 
one game a general vogue than to teach a hundred games, 
however good, is that you are doing well if you can make 
even one new game successful. Children are very conserva- 
tive, and it is hard to plant a game so firmly that it will grow 
in the shifting and anarchistic soil of the Big Injun age. 
The test is not what the children will do while some older 
person is playing with them, nor even what they will do on 
the playground without such leadership. The real test is 
what they will play in the streets and empty lots, what will 
absorb the mind of boydom and girldom throughout your 
neighborhood. A real game is an institution, something 
that lives in the hearts of its constituency, in which a vital 
interest is embodied. When handball was started at the 
North End Park in Boston, it made a handball court of every 



200 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

blank wall in that district. Anybody who will make 
prisoner's base again the fashion in any city where it has died 
out, and so make a playground of every street not too much 
given over to the intruding interests of traffic, will be a 
benefactor to all its future generations, and earn the monu- 
ment of one who has made two children grow where one tried 
to grow before. The difficulty of the task as well as its 
beneficence will merit such canonization. 

Third : The fighting instinct is seen in sedentary games 
as well as in the more violent kind. Big Injuns make a con- 
test of almost everything. No playground where children 
are expected to spend a large part of the day, for instance no 
summer playground, should be without provision for quiet 
games, of which checkers is one of the best, and also the most 
popular. 

So insistent is the fighting instinct during the Big Injun 
age that no play after that age is well begun is much cared 
for unless it calls for courage, intense exertion, and much 
acquired skill. Those who imagine that plaj' is easy should 
observe the effect of the fighting instinct in children's games. 
Is football easy? Or baseball, or climbing stunts, or any 
other form of full and earnest competition? Is it easy to 
win — eas}^ for both sides to do so ? What, then, is hard ? 
What else do children do that carries them so beyond them- 
selves, whether in daring, in effort, or in achievement? Do 
they spell or read or cipher themselves into such moral ex- 
pansion? The nearest they will come to doing so will be 
in a spelling match or other exercise in which the great play 
instinct of competition is aroused. Its sway in such a case 
affords some pale suggestion of its power within its abo- 
riginal domain. 

To this account of the fighting forms of play should be 



THE FIGHTING INSTINCT 201 

added this upon the American spirit of competition : ex- 
cellent as this spirit is in the main, it is not in itself the 
whole of what the play spirit should be. It is one-sided, 
and requires supplementing. Especially it needs as a correc- 
tive the German idea of a standard, of toeing the mark, 
attaining a decent minimum in all round development : 
the idea through which the Fatherland has rendered such 
noble service to her sons. People can attain a standard 
when it is required of them — witness the feats of horseman- 
ship that every West Point cadet learns to perform. Do it 
for America : make yourself, whether you can hope to shine 
in competition or not — regardless of any such reward — the 
sort of unit of which your country's temple can be built. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

CHASING, CLIMBING, FALLING, AND MINOR INSTINCTS 

Competition is not the only desire of the Big Injun age, 
although so strong a one as to be a factor in almost all its 
play. The hunting instinct, combined with competition, 
forms the basis of hundreds of games, including all those 
which are most popular during the early stages of this period. 
In hide and go seek and other hiding games we have the 
elements of seeking and lying in wait, and in some of them 
that of pouncing out upon the prey. It is observable that 
children in their chasing games prefer to catch hold of the 
quarry — using for instance the ancient rubric " Five, ten, 
one of my men," to measure the duration of the arrest — 
or even to throw him down, rather than merely touch him. 
In some games of the I spy, run sheep run, variety there is 
opportunity for complicated plans of stalking the prey, and 
for long expeditions, sometimes involving sore trials and 
adventures to bring them to a successful issue. In the 
chasing games we can trace, in short, the shadowy outline 
of the same predatory inheritance that still causes old gentle- 
men to crawl on their stomachs through a swamp, or to 
freeze for hours behind a screen of boughs, on the chance of 
circumventing a trout or duck. 

But the chasing games are not wholly expressions of the 
hunting instinct, unless we include the inheritance not only 
of the hunter but of the pursued. The love of chasing 
is evidently not their only attraction — as is reported to 
be the case with dogs. There is as much if not greater inter- 

202 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 203 

est in getting away. Children do not like especially to be 
"it." On the contrary the simplest form of tag is often a 
mere teasing game, in which the main attraction is tormenting 
the slowest runner. In all the chasing games the pursued are 
at least as well pleased as the pursuers : the frenzy of flight 
fully matches the passion of pursuit. In my own observa- 
tion, indeed, the predominantly pursuer child is the excep- 
tion. He is not exactly a "sport," in the biological sense, but 
a minority strand in the racial composition — like those 
South American cattle who possess the exceptional quality 
of initiative and who, as Darwin tells us, command a scarcity 
value for leading bullock teams on that account. If I were 
choosing a district attorney, I would look out for one who had 
been a pursuer child. 

In some games, indeed, the running away is the whole 
thing, the chasing being delegated to elders or to officials 
whose interest can be enlisted in the cause ■ — for instance 
the games of stealing fruit or groceries, of ringing doorbells, 
of snowballing the august. The whole variegated history of 
mischief is largely the story of "getting away with it." 
Last tag, I think, must come pretty near being the oldest 
game; our respected cousins who have remained arboreal 
are still fond of playing it, as may be seen in any menagerie ; 
and there must have been hundreds of centuries in which 
that form of intercourse with irascible contemporaries — 
perhaps throwing stones and nuts at the non-climbing species 
instead of tagging them — were a daily pastime of our race, 
though probably not promotive of its popularity. Horses, 
cows, dogs, and elderly gentlemen still serve the youthful 
members of it in the same capacity. Sometimes the pursuer 
is of a supernatural order, a witch, ghost, or Bogey Man, 
or simply the dark. Pirates also and notorious raiders like 
the Black Douglas make excellent pursuers at a pinch. 



204 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

I suppose the explanation of this escaping instinct is that 
man" is as much a product of successful flight as of successful 
hunting, that in the long centuries of his development the 
faculty of being somewhere else was as important as that of 
being on the spot. When one thinks of man's weakness as 
compared with the other large animals, and of how annoying 
as well as appetizing he must have appeared to them, it 
would seem as though this must have been the case. To 
get first to the tree and a little way up it before the other 
party to the transaction arrived must have been a decisive 
factor in the survival of our respected progenitors during 
centuries in which they occupied apartments next to the 
cave lion or disputed hunting grounds with bears and other 
hungry and unsympathetic neighbors who were their su- 
periors in strength. The wolf is a creature who has haunted 
man's imagination even down to historic times. Myth and 
tradition still bear traces of the extent to which for centuries 
he must have eked out his diet with the less speedy members 
of our race. In men's relations to each other also, survival 
must, in countless instances, have been for those w^ho could 
get first back to the boats or to some place of concealment 
or defense; and there is certainly in the chasing games 
evidence of a strong homing instinct in the getting back 
to gool or to one's own line or side. In some games, as in 
fox and geese, there is the protection by the mother of her 
young. 

There is also, I think, in the chasing games a discernible 
reminiscence of the raid or foray. Indeed the very center 
of the instinct on which these games are founded seems to 
urge the planning of a descent upon some neighbor group, 
stealing up upon them unawares, watching them as they go 
unsuspectingly about their daily tasks all unconscious of 
impending fate, leaping out from the underbrush with 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 205 

dreadful howls, — and then slay, burn, tomahawk and carry- 
off, and disappear with wild yells of triumph, or push off in 
one's light shallop and sail triumphant home, each narrating 
his own marvelous exploits. Some such tendencies make 
the inspiration of the I spy games, of French and Indians, 
robbers and policemen, "trees"; and the satisfaction is 
greatest when there is a large more or less wild tract to run 
over, with some cozy spot as a home camp for each side. 
Games of this class ought to be more encouraged than they 
have been heretofore by playground leaders wherever op- 
portunity exists. 

Two secondary instincts, already mentioned as subsidiary 
to those of hunting and fighting, and serving with them as a 
basis for many important games of the Big Injun age, are 
striking with a stick and throwing at a mark.^ At the corner 
where these instincts join the main thoroughfare of contest 
many of our best games are built. Ring toss — to begin 
with a minor instance of the marksman instinct — is one 
of the few games that will go without watching on almost 
any playground; and quoits, its grown-up counterpart, 
shows similar persistence. Tip cat and duck on a rock are 
among the most popular games we have. The former has 
the great advantage of being easily carried on in city streets, 
as may be observed in New York for instance where it 
sometimes combines with certain features of baseball. Base- 
ball itself, in the individualistic form of scrub or three old 
cats, is an increasing obsession of this age. Marbles, univer- 
sally popular, contains the same element, though it is to be 
regretted that nowadays mere tossing seems to have driven 
out the more scientific snapping of the marble under the 
reiterated injunction of "knuckle down." Tops reach their 
^ Dr. Gulick has shown the importance of these instincts. 



206 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

greatest popularity when it is part of the game to strike, 
and if possible to split down the middle, your adversary's 
top by a straight and mighty throw. Snowballing satisfies 
the instinct in its more heroic aspect, and is a favorite form 
of warfare between boys from different towns or neighbor- 
hoods. Our national games — baseball, football, basket 
ball, hockey, tennis, golf, and billiards — are all based in 
part on marksmanship, as are a hundred minor ones, includ- 
ing even parlor games like bean bag, ping pong, and croki- 
nole. Ball games are found among many primitive races and 
were an obsession in America before the white man came. 

The other subsidiary instinct, hitting with a stick, is almost 
equally pervasive. It is an element in most of our important 
games, including cat, hockey (with its variations of shinny 
and polo), baseball, cricket, billiards, golf, and tennis. In 
all of these it is combined with marksmanship — the hitting 
is either at a mark or with some idea of placing, as in tennis 
and baseball. The marksman instinct finds satisfaction 
not merely in the aboriginal form of throwing, but in aiming 
by any sort of method, whether with a bat, a stick, a racket, 
a bow, a gun, a sling, by throwing a potato on a ^tick, or by 
kicking at a goal as in football. The instinct is strong enough 
even to support such dry forms of competition as the mere 
throwing or shooting match — though interest is always 
enhanced when the target is a bottle, window, hen, or other 
object that affords some catastrophic reaction to help out. 
So strong indeed is the marksman instinct that it threatens, 
in America at least, to absorb the whole play schedule to 
itself. The American youth are just now missile mad. The 
old running games — like hill dill, three deep, prisoners' 
base — languish ; and everything has to be, if not baseball 
or a modification of it, at least some sort of throwing 
game. Playground ball, squash ball, basket ball, dodge 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 207 

ball, captain ball, volley ball — if the word ball is not in it 
a new game need not apply, and hardly an old one can be 
confident of survival. There is need in this country of a 
Myopia Game Association or Astigmatics' Protective League 
to preserve the right to play for those whose physical apti- 
tude is not in the direction of the prevailing craze. 

Striking with a stick, apart from aiming a missile at some- 
thing, is not found in any popular game so far as I remember, 
but it makes part of the fun in patting mud pies, in chopping, 
drumming, whacking fences, and cutting ofiF the heads of 
flowers by the roadside as you go along, and I suppose of 
singlestick. It certainly added a joy to a (wooden) sword- 
and-buckler existence that I partook of at one period. 

Climbing is an important instinct of the Big Injun age. 
It appears, indeed, during the preceding period, and even in 
the astonishing grip that the nursery Hercules fastens on 
any finger, nose, or other convenient object that comes within 
his reach ; but somewhere from eight to eleven is the time 
of its most marked development. A tree is to a child an 
obviously useful object, a Jacob's ladder to be climbed, a 
leafy castle to be explored, or just something to be gone up, 
without ulterior design. There is a thrill in getting to the 
top and looking out over the billows of the surrounding 
woods, — with incidental joys in bending slim trees over 
until they let you down to the ground, or perchance in break- 
ing off the tops of young pines and crashing through the thick 
branches ; although the time you landed in the hornets' 
nest may bring back with it a painful remembrance, even at 
a distance of some forty years. There is joy in swinging 
on the ends of long branches, or in finding a seat high up 
among the leaves, in which you take those delicious naps, of 
seldom less than four seconds' duration, to show your friends 



208 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

how comfortable it is. There is fascination also in the 
danger, and in setting stunts to the less expert. I remember 
a rock — named "the Devil's Window-pane " because of its 
steepness and the black lichen that grew on it — where a 
favorite terror was extracted by climbing to a certain point 
and then expecting never to get down again, at least without 
" a man and a ladder and a lot of ropes." 

The love of swinging is perhaps part of the climbing in- 
stinct. It is certainly strong in monkeys, and there is some- 
thing delicious to watch in the way they will hang from a 
high bar, spring and catch a lower one, and swing up again 
to another high one on the other side. There is a perfection 
of rhythm, a joy in strength, and an illusion of flying in such 
a performance that goes so straight to our human sympathies 
as to powerfully suggest a reminiscence. But the main 
fascination of climbing is in the climbing itself. Children 
like to climb because they are born that way ; and they will 
get a great part of the satisfaction in a barn or a half-built 
house or even on ladders properly arranged. 

Climbing is one of the few non-competitive, non-dramatic 
occupations that will be much engaged in~ simply for its own 
sake; but with it, as in every other instance, the enlistment 
of another instinct, especially as combined in a game, will 
more than double the attraction. A good combination is 
with chasing, if you can arrange matters so that successful 
flight is possible. "Jagua and monkeys" once, in my own 
experience, had a great run as played in an English elm 
fitted up with ropes so that there were two ways of going up 
or down besides the main stem. In another case I know of, 
tag has flourished many seasons on a beam and set of ladders 
connected with a piazza and a back fence. 

Climbing seems to be a marked instance of a passing, or at 
least a fading, instinct. Grown people do not feel the 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 209 

necessity of shinning up ropes or ascending trees. Mountain 
climbing I take to be mainly love of nature plus the perennial 
Big Injun instinct for conspicuous and dangerous stunts. 
Even adolescents cease to be arboreal ; their gymnastic 
feats arise from patriotism, as in the Turn Vereins, or from 
love of competition. 

Then there are the sliding games, or rather plays, for there 
is but little competition in them, — coasting, skiing, running 
on the waves, sliding on the ice or on slanting poles, or sliding 
down the cellar door. Coasting is the most popular of these, 
and deservedly so, especially in the country, and most of all 
on a good crust. Any one who has ever started out on a 
bright winter morning on one of our New England hills, 
with a trusty sled and the whole world at his feet, with the 
sense that he can be in a few seconds in what part of it he 
likes, has felt the true exhilaration of the explorer. And the 
evenings when all are coasting together and the coast is 
getting harder and faster every minute, while the big white 
moon comes up, the snow squeaks under your feet, and the 
sleigh bells sound crisp and far, are not less inspiring. Then 
there is double-runner coasting, in which the steersman, 
weighed down with responsibility, pilots the hurtling craft 
round hair-raising corners, past sleighs with their hysterical 
horses, over slews and jounces and straight drops, safe to 
the distant end of the coast, where everybody hopes we have 
made the farthest mark. That is perhaps the form in which 
coasting holds its popularity the longest — as illustrated for 
instance at St. Moritz. And the Chinaman's unsympathetic 
description of tobogganing : "Whish ! — walkee up a mile," 
suggests how good exercise it is ; while to the boys and girls 
the walk up is taken almost unconsciously in the antici- 
patory excitement of the next coast. 



210 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

It is extraordinary with what small coasts little children 
can be satisfied. One with a drop of four or five feet, es- 
pecially if well iced, will hold them day after day in perfect 
contentment. I have known a boy of five to coast all the 
afternoon on a wedge of snow of a measure height of sixteen 
inches. Public playgrounds, by means of low banks or 
artificial slides, might reach thousands of children who now 
have no fair chance to play during the winter. 

And coasting need not be confined to winter. Little 
children, as I have said, like very much to run down a bank, 
and any kind of inclined plane is a very good piece of ap- 
paratus for children from the time they can walk. A board 
tilted up at one end is used in Japan in playgrounds especially 
provided for the soldiers' orphans. As the children get older, 
the plane can be tilted a little more and used as a slide. 
They will coast on it not only all winter, but all summer too. 
Sometimes it is a boy on a sled, sometimes a boy on a board, 
and sometimes just a boy — this piece of apparatus is 
perhaps not so popular with the mothers as some other kinds. 
It should be made of maple or of some kind of metal, to avoid 
splinters. Slanting poles to slide down (which should be of 
metal), with a ladder to reach them by, and plain wooden 
coasts of the cellar door variety, are among the most popular 
playground appliances. 

In all coasting the element of balancing comes in and is 
part of the fascination ; it is especially prominent in standing 
up on a slide or a toboggan or on skis or skates, or in balanc- 
ing a canoe on a big wave. I suppose about the best coasting 
must be the Hawaiian sport of riding the great Pacific combers 
on a plank; while their summer pastime of sliding over 
waterfalls on the slippery moss into the deep pool beneath, 
as shown in La Farge's pictures, is sport for Diana's own 
nymphs. No doubt this combination of straight drop and 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 211 

thrilling plunge will be utilized at our pleasure resorts before 
long, as so many other forms of coasting already are. The 
straight drop, with its command of those visceral sensations 
of which emotion is said actually to consist, is, as I have 
said, the mechanical equivalent of melodrama. 

The first falling game following those, like "falling, 
falling," "I had a little hobbyhorse," etc., for which the pa- 
rental arms, lap, and legs furnish the necessary apparatus — 
a game happily combining coasting with the sympathetic 
illustration of the wheel — is that of rolling down a bank. I 
once asked a little girl how she managed to play in her back 
yard in town. She said, " Well, you see, we are very lucky 
because we have two barrels." I congratulated her upon 
the circumstance, but could not at once divine the precise 
nature of the good fortune thus assured. She explained, 
" You see there is a bank at the side, and we get in the barrels 
and roll down." 

Wading is a favorite form of play during this period 
and is part of the attraction in sailing shells and chips and 
toy boats. It has so strong and otherwise unaccountable a 
hold that it almost seems to be a special instinct. For 
children living at the seashore, with all its resources, wading 
pure and simple seems rather an unenterprising occupation ; 
but for city children the impulse is profitably recognized 
in the wading pools that now form a part of many play- 
grounds. 

The Big Injun hungers for quiet as well as lively play. 
He is, as I have said, fond of many sedentary forms of com- 
petition ; and he is at least as strongly possessed of the con- 
structive as of the destructive instinct, and will appreciate 
all kinds of opportunities for making things. A man whom I 



212 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

knew, who remained a good deal of a Big Injun all his life 
and was especially noted as a fighter, was peculiarly fond of 
knitting, which indeed took a place with him only second to 
the gentle art of self-defense. 

It is a sound principle of the great English educator, 
Edward Thring, that the nerve tissue of teachers should never 
be called upon to do anything that wood or iron can accom- 
plish just as well. Apparatus is, accordingly, of great value 
on the playground or in the back yard during the Big Injun 
age, provided it is of the sort that the children really like 
to use. The swing is still popular during this period. I 
have been at the Columbus Avenue playground in Boston 
on dark winter afternoons when the thermometer was in the 
neighborhood of twenty and the wind was driving the dust 
and cinders like a sandstorm in the desert, and have rarely 
found an empty swing. But the best form of the swing 
at this age is that of the trapeze, set high enough for a boy to 
swing under it with his legs drawn up, and low enough for 
him not to hurt himself when he drops off into properly 
softened ground at the end of the swing — and with a raised 
platform to start from. Such a trapeze may be seen on many 
playgrounds, carrying a different boy with every swing it 
makes, so that you could almost tell time by counting the 
number of individual swings and jumps. Traveling rings 
and giant strides have now a similar fascination. The tilt 
is an ever popular piece of apparatus and, exalted in the same 
manner as the swing, it may be now translated into the teeter 
ladder, which, like the trapeze, you hang under instead of 
sitting on. Teeter ladders are considered by many play- 
ground people especially dangerous, but I have not found 
them so when placed low enough for the children to reach 
while standing on the ground, and where the ground is kept 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 213 

soft under them. Coasts of the parallel pole and cellar 
door varieties have already been spoken of. And there 
should be a vaulting horse, and a sand or tanbark place for 
tumbling. 

Apparatus is peculiarly valuable on the playground as a 
means of attracting the newcomer, or the child who is shy 
and does not yet belong to any particular gang or is not pro- 
ficient at the prevailing game. It gives him something to do 
while he is getting acquainted. 

There is another desire that apparatus meets of which 
special mention should be made — a desire characteristic of 
the Big Injun age, and accurately corresponding to the stage 
of development of the nerve centers and the muscles and other 
organs during this period, namely, the sheer craving to ex- 
ploit the bodily powers. Nature's call to the child to come 
and play with her is not all one note, but a chorus of many 
voices. Not only do mind and desire turn naturally toward 
daring physical exploit, but the muscles hunger to put forth 
their strength, the heart longs to be used to its capacity, 
the lungs thirst for full expansion. The nerves also tingle 
in anticipation of the message they are tuned to carry ; the 
very bones call for stress and strain. 

But even strenuous exercise of nerve or muscle, taken 
simply as such and without external, instinctively attractive 
object, is more or less satisfying according as it runs along 
instinctive lines. Thus though there are games in which 
the competition is chiefly in feats of bodily control, such as 
jump rope, fancy skating, hop scotch, or playing poison 
(running across the rocks without touching sand or water), 
it is still true that in all of these the motions — hopping, 
skipping, jumping, balancing — are large purposeful motions 
of the whole body, not isolated contractions of one member 



214 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

at a time, and that in no game that holds a large place 
are the feats mere contortions or efforts of muscle pure 
and simple. And so in the use of apparatus it is the large 
combined uses of the muscles, as in climbing and swinging, 
that are most satisfying. 

The organs not merely hunger for use but have in them- 
selves a bias toward the particular sort of use the major 
instincts call for. I read the other day of a man who, 
having been abandoned by the doctors as incurable at the 
age of fifty, made himself well and strong, and had so con- 
tinued twenty years beyond that age, by means of a set of 
exercises, taken while in bed, that expressed the cravings of 
his body (or ideal motion. I do not know how much of 
the story is true or possible, but it contains a truth. There 
is for every body a physical ideal, a sort of divine emanation, 
toward which it tends, and in the expression of which it 
rejoices and grows strong. And this bodily ideal closely 
corresponds to the constituting human instincts, through 
which indeed it has been largely fashioned. The motions 
and attitudes required in running, dodging, fighting, and 
wrestling are the ones the body most hungers for — these 
and others expressive of the social instincts, such as love, 
command, submission. Mars, Diana, Aphrodite, Zeus, still 
prescribe the ideals of the human form. Hence the signifi- 
cance of gesture, the wonderful possibilities of bodily ex- 
pression; hence one main element in "the healthful art of 
dancing" of which Dr. Gulick has written so well. In 
Nature's plan of life and growth there is no separation of 
the bodily and the mental side. The achievement which 
instinct craves the members long to execute. It is because 
organ and instinct are thus attuned that when the soul's 
opportunity presents itself, the whole being responds ; mind 
and body pull all one way. 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 215 

It should be said, in concluding this description of the 
miscellaneous play impulses of the Big Injun age, that at 
this period, because of its extt-eme individualism, a play 
leader is essential, unless among a group for whom the 
element of leadership is already supplied by a strong tradi- 
tion of good games transmitted from the older children. It is 
undoubtedly well that children should teach each other, 
that they should evolve their own social order, and to some 
extent invent their own games. But because self-help 
is good it does not follow that we should trust to it alto- 
gether. The process is apt to be an expensive one to the 
neighbors; and, if allowed to drag on too long, it may be 
even more so to the child himself. It is at this age that 
Satan forms his most extensive business connection with 
idle hands ; for it is the age at which hands feel most intensely 
their vocation to be doing something and find least internal 
guidance as to what is to be done. The play leader, on the 
other hand, if he remembers that his function is to abolish 
himself, to make his own presence unnecessary, will do but 
little harm and may be the means of preventing fatal mis- 
takes and the waste of precious time. 

People sometimes assume that the amount of originality 
is necessarily in inverse proportion to the amount of teaching. 
I believe that, if the teaching be judicious, the opposite is 
true. Originality works not in a vacuum, but upon data 
presented from the outside. Learning a new game is to a 
child not a debilitating but a liberating experience, opening 
up new opportunities for the exercise of invention. The 
country child is not weakened but set free when his parent 
or teacher points out the riches that lie around him, and so 
unlocks the door between him and his mother Nature, with 
her varied storehouse of those treasures that are prophesied 
in his instinctive interests, and in contact with which his 



216 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

fullest development is found. The scope for the exploring of 
new regions is proportional, not to the degree of ignorance, 
but, on the contrary, to the length of the frontier already 
established in the mind. A child who has been to the kinder- 
garten will be more capable of inventing games than one who 
has not, just as the educated man is not less, but more, re- 
sourceful than the uneducated. The more the circle widens, 
the longer its circumference becomes. There is no fence 
around the universe; its borders recede as you advance. 
Provided children are left in their actual playing as much as 
possible to themselves, the teaching that enables them to 
play will enlarge the scope for their originality. The great 
national games are a most important part of our inheritance, 
but they are not evolved by each set of children ; they are 
taught by one set to another. Where, through untoward 
circumstances, the tradition has been lost, it is necessary 
that the inheritance should be passed on through outside 
channels, lest in such cases child-civilization revert to the 
barbarism of the centuries before the great games were 
evolved. If you are unwilling that children should be 
taught games, you ought first to try it on yourself. For- 
swear golf and tennis, yachts and automobiles, waltzes 
and whist, books, pictures, music, and the theatre, and 
invent your own games, dances, and playthings for your- 
self. 

As a matter of practical experience, the opinion of those 
who have done actual playground work is unanimous to the 
effect that leadership on a playground for children between 
six and eleven years old is a necessity. The child of this 
period is not a finished nor an independent creature, but an 
incomplete and partial one. The elder brother or leader is 
his implied complement. It is the case of the baby and the 
mother over again. 



CHASING, CLIMBING, AND FALLING 217 

A play leader costs something, it is true, but there is 
danger of our being penny-wise in this matter. In a big 
city especially, where the playground costs many thousands 
of dollars, it is poor economy to save the salary of a man or 
woman who could more than treble its effectiveness. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 

The Big Injun age is the time for making the intimate 
acquaintance of birds and beasts, for seeing the horses fed 
and the cows milked, for visiting the woodchuck's hole and 
the phoebe's nest and knowing where the muskrats are 
building their winter house — even for calling on the pigs 
in their humble abode, though one's own company should 
in consequence become less sought after. No child can be 
keptiin school in June without great difficulty — that is to 
say, it is difficult to keep him incarcerated in our school- 
rooms away from the great school that Nature keeps, though 
our well-named truancy laws (laws to compel truancy) strive 
hard to do so. The general and devouring curiosity of this 
age is at its strongest toward living things : the call of life 
to life is the deepest even purely intellectual appeal. 

It is unfortunately true that the interest in one's fellow- 
creatures is not at this time always of a sympathetic sort. 
I remember a time when it was an object of ambition to 
"spat" the pig so satisfactorily with a flat stick that he 
would run all the way round the sty, so that you could spat 
him again and thus apparently solve the problem of per- 
petual motion. The tendencies to touch and handle, and to 
develop the full reaction of every object, may turn to tor- 
turing animals and insects. But such manifestations are 
not inevitable; nor are they those from which the child 
derives the greatest satisfaction. Boys can, even in a few 
weeks, be converted from killing frogs and torturing other 

218 



NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 219 

creatures to a sympathetic study of their ways of life. I 
read the other day of some boys who were going to kill a 
spider, but who, when they had seen him set afloat on a chip 
and watched him send out his flying rope to leeward and 
climb ashore on it, greeted him with three cheers. Even 
the purely scientific interest, where living things are the 
object of it, in the end means sympathy, for that is the only 
road toward important knowledge. You can get noise out 
of a piano by merely thumping on it, but to get its story 
you must learn to play. The child is no pedant ; he wants 
not catalogues of facts but to cuddle up next the living 
truth, and his instinct is for the road that truly leads there. 

Apparent cruelty, indeed, is not always a discouraging 
symptom. It may be only a coincidence that several of the 
best surgeons of my acquaintance have also been notable 
as sportsmen : but barring the inevitable joke, there is in 
the two pursuits the common element of a thirst for close con- 
tact with living things. I am sure that, to take an analogous 
phenomenon, teasing — which is such a common manifesta- 
tion of the Big Injun age — is by no means a bad sign. The 
inability to keep hands off and let the other child alone, the 
necessity to push and pinch and tease, betrays an irre- 
sistible interest in the subject matter of affection ; and it is 
often the teasing child who is most affectionate. 

But curiosity is not the only instinct that draws life 
toward life. Pulling in the same direction there is the in- 
stinct to foster and protect. Boys and girls want not only 
to find out about birds and animals and small children, but 
to take care of them ; and the latter instinct will become in 
the case of any creature they have much dealing with the 
more intense. What is now at work in them is another of 
the great streams of being, the great maternal instinct of 
the race, — the instinct to foster life, to care for the young, 



220 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the weak, and the unprotected ; originally, and still always 
at its heart, the mother instinct — the great woman law of 
nature complementary to the law of contest — the instinct 
that makes childhood possible, that has led mothers through 
countless ages to give their lives for their children, that will 
continue to make such sacrifice the rule so long as our race 
survives. 

It is in the Big Injun age that this great nurturing instinct 
gets its growth. It has indeed appeared, especially in the 
care of dolls, during the dramatic age and even earlier. 
But the stress of the impulse and the bent of the child's 
nature to receive it comes at this later time. 

The great mother instinct is almost as strong in men as 
it is in women. Men for instance seem to be as fond of 
pets as women are when other objects of affection are lack- 
ing. I remember seeing a big swarthy United States marine 
waiting with his companions in a railroad station, carrying 
on his shoulder a huge orange-colored cat with an enormous 
crimson bow. None of the others seemed to see anything 
strange in such comradeship. And in general an addiction 
to pet birds and cats and other mascots is as strong among 
sailors as among old maids. Both are cases of a starved 
maternal instinct. It is well known that the friendship of 
rats and mice has saved the lives of many prisoners. Even 
tough old Captain Slocum speaks with tenderness of the 
Boston spider who shared his adventurous voyage ; and we 
all know that, through sympathetic observation by the 
national hero, a spider wove an important piece of Scottish 
history. It is a touch of Tolstoi's genius that makes his 
hero in " The Cossacks," when he throws himself down in the 
wet grass in the midst of a hunting trip, love even the com- 
panionship of the mosquitoes. 

And maternal feeling in the male of our race is nothing 



NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 221 

new. I have already cited the ease of certain races of 
monkeys among whom the male gives suck to the young. 
As illustrating the quality in its heroic aspect, Darwin quotes 
a story of the rescue of a small monkey by one of the male 
members of his tribe. The monkey people had just crossed 
a ravine, somewhere in Australia I think, when a naturalists' 
exploring party came along. The explorers' dogs attacked 
the rear of the procession and had succeeded in cutting out a 
small monkey and isolating him on the top of a bowlder so 
that he could not get away, when a large male, seeing his 
predicament, returned down the hill and by his fierce looks 
frightened the dogs away and rescued the little monkey. 
Darwin adds that he would rather trace his ancestry from 
that heroic monkey than from many humans. 

The nurture instinct in mankind, though strictly maternal 
at the start, has broadened to an impulse to foster all life, 
and has appeared in a thousand forms and a great variety 
of relations. It is often a strong element in the love of a 
man for a woman, and is perhaps always present in the 
converse relation. Stevenson says that the best examples 
he has known of the maternal instinct have been in the case 
of old maids. It is often seen in the feeling of children toward 
their parents, of friend toward friend, and is indeed an 
ingredient in all human affection and in all desire to foster 
life, whether in human beings or in plants or animals. The 
common association of the diminutive with affection shows 
its wide spread. Everything you love as a living thing is to 
some extent your own baby. 

The mother instinct is the heart of altruism and its carry- 
ing force. Even true imagination of another life would re- 
main cold did not knowledge bring with itself the desire to 
foster. The humanitarian movement of the last century — 
the protection of women and children against long hours 



222 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

and overwork ; the emancipation of women, of the debtor, 
of the slave ; charity organization ; the movement for better 
housing, for better schools, for more playgrounds — was the 
work of the mothering impulse. Dickens, whose books 
reflect the passion of that movement and were in themselves 
no inconsiderable part of it, was a mother at heart, albeit 
mater furians. As one of the great educational leaders of 
the century, he voiced the mother instinct of England 
toward her tortured and neglected children. 

It is the nurturing impulse that is idealized in the later 
and higher forms of religion, in the conception of God as a 
father to be obeyed rather than as a capricious ruler to be 
pacified. Buddhism and Christianity have alike placed 
this motive, the desire to succor all life, first in their scheme 
of ethics. Buddhism making the broader application, Chris- 
tianity, as we at least believe, the more intense. God the 
Father, God the lover of his fellow men, have been the 
makers of our modern world ; and God the Mother has not 
been far away. 

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often would I have 
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her chickens under her wings, and ye would not 1 If in the 
humanitarian movement and in the religions expressive of its 
central impulse there is also a large element of the democratic 
passion, and perhaps also a general sense of the identity of all 
life and a love of all living things, not derivable from the 
maternal instinct, the latter has nevertheless a great part in 
these. 

It is a sufficient reason for giving the nurturing instinct 
its day, in which to make a nurturer for life of the creature 
fortunate enough to be possessed by it, that it is an ennobling 
impulse, an essential part of human nature at its best. But 
if we must have uses and secondary reasons to justify a 



NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 223 

course in education, it is well to remember that nurture is 
one of the practically indispensable faculties of man. If 
mothers should ever lack the ability effectively to express 
this instinct, the race would not survive. Babies do not 
live on milk alone, but chiefly on their mothers' comradeship, 
and the same power of expression in fathers is almost equally 
necessary to their health and growth. 

And power of expression of the nurturing instinct is neces- 
sary in other ways. It is at the bottom of all successful 
nursing ; and nursing, as we are beginning to understand, is 
the larger half of medicine. It is the nurture instinct that 
supplies the element of intuition in gardening and farming 
and stock raising. Successful farmers say that cows are 
sensitive to kind or rough treatment and that the ledger 
shows the difference. Nobody can train a horse, whether 
to race or pull a cart, who lacks this faculty. And nobody 
can deal successfully with human beings in any relation of 
control who has not got it. I know a business oflBce which 
has for a generation been a kindergarten for aspiring youth, 
a main item in the firm's success having been the maternal 
quality of its head. Managers of mills and factories are 
learning rapidly, if somewhat late, that a desire to promote 
the successful life of their workers, and insight into how to 
do it without offense, is essential to their own success. And 
the fiercer the competition the more clearly important is 
such application of the maternal instinct. Many great 
soldiers have been known as Father — or even Old Mother 
— So and So. The same is true of successful captains — 
whether of ships or football teams. Father Abraham won 
out very largely on the maternal quality of his great heart. 

In his play of " Man and Superman," Bernard Shaw has 
humorously presented the self-perpetuating instinct of the 
race, as embodied in a woman, overcoming the individual 



224 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

ambitions of a man and appropriating him to its own pur- 
poses. But the real Superman, the true representative of 
the race Hfe, is the maternal instinct. And it does not fight 
against the individual's own life but is an essential element 
of it. A man is not quite a man who has not something of 
the mother in him. 

How we may give this instinct its way in our children to 
mold them to the beauty of its service is partly indicated 
in what has been said above of the tendency of knowledge 
to blossom automatically into love — cruelty, in children, 
being the symptom of imperfect acquaintance, its cure the 
encouragement of greater intimacy. Children should be 
shown what the plants and animals are trying to do, so as to 
see the drama of their lives from their point of view. A 
reenforcement of the child's own mother instinct may inci- 
dentally be acquired from the example of all these heroic 
little mothers of the animal world : nature study should be 
largely nurture study — of how the birds and squirrels 
build their houses, feed and protect their young; how the 
mother bird draws you away from her nest by pretending 
to be lame ; how she teaches her children to fly. 

But intimacy should not be merely intellectual. The 
Big Injun age is the age of pets. Dolls, it is true, survive, 
sometimes even to the fourteenth year. But something 
more realistic is also needed. Every child should have 
some creature to take care of, if it is only a turtle or a mouse. 
He should also have plants to look after, and will often care 
passionately for these — but a vegetable love is not enough. 
As to the best sort of pet : birds are apt to get sick and 
mope, or come to some tragic end ; and they never give to 
children the fullest companionship, partly because they can- 
not be squeezed or handled to advantage. A horse or pony 



NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 225 

is a good sort of pet if you have the bank notes to feed him 
on. And if he has Morgan blood, with its sensitive nose, its 
broad forehead to understand, its quick ear for every shade 
of meaning, and its memory of the old days on the desert 
when it was the confidant of its Arab master and his family, 
a horse will do very well indeed — nobody, man or child, 
can well have a more sympathetic or a nobler companion. 
But even a Morgan horse — glad as he would be to share 
our tent — will find himself out of place in the modern flat. 
A similar inconvenience attends the friendship of calves and 
goats and all the larger mammals. The appeal is there, 
however, where the physical conditions can be managed. 
The boys in our Massachusetts reform school, I am told, are 
never rough to a cow. 

A kitten or a dog makes the best companion for a small 
child because in the first place it can live indoors, be with 
him whenever he needs companionship, and take part in all 
family occasions. And these creatures seem to get so much 
out of it themselves that there springs up the reciprocity of 
relation without which there cannot be true friendship. 
Children and animals seem natural comrades, and easily 
establish a freemasonry from which older humans are ex- 
cluded. There is nothing a dog will not put up with from 
the younger members of the family, however stand-offish 
he may be with older people. An old retainer who will be 
only politely bored by the attentions of grown-ups, and will 
resent any familiarity from strangers, will let the children 
roll him over, pull his tail, and throttle him to their hearts' 
content, and evidently enjoy the process. He seems to 
remember that he was himself a puppy once and to take a 
benign pleasure in seeing the happiness of the young folks 
and contributing to it. 

A kitten is almost equally tolerant, because kittens were 



226 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

also born to play, and will let a small child drag it across 
the floor by the neck, throttling it at every step of his quad- 
rupedal progress, without even a remonstrance. But the 
promise is not fulfilled when it grows up. A cat never has 
the sympathy for human frailty that is shown by a dog or 
horse — for the reason, I suppose, that the cat is not a gre- 
garious animal. The dog — doubtless because of his 
descent from the wolf and the wolf pack — is a highly social 
being. There is nothing in the way of tact that he is 
not past master of, no mood or social attitude that he 
does not intuitively understand. His manners are a perfect 
vehicle of personalit}^ — noble if he is noble, mean if he is 
mean, but always accurately expressive of his moral atti- 
tude — perhaps because in the fierce training of the pack 
good manners and continued life must have been synonj'mous 
through thousands of generations of his ancestors. Indeed 
the social training of the dog, if narrower, seems to have 
been more thorough than that of man. At all events he is 
to-day the more wholly social animal. 

There should be pets and plants at home, and so far as 
possible in the school and on the playground. On the latter, 
in some instances, not only small gardens, but the keeping 
of pigeons, hens, and rabbits has been successfully intro- 
duced ; and feeding the pigeons or the goldfish is a classic 
amusement not only in the Place of St. Mark and the Tuileries 
Gardens, but in many other outdoor parks and public 
places the world over. 

Children of this and the succeeding age should be given 
some care of other children. The little mothers w^ho have 
to spend such long hours looking after children only one 
size smaller than themselves undoubtedly have too much 
responsibility of this sort; but among the well-to-do the 
children are starved by having too little of it. To be re- 



NURTURE IN THE BIG INJUN AGE 227 

lieved of those elementary tasks through which the race 
has risen from its former low estate is to be deprived of the 
best part of one's birthright. Any small girl will love a 
baby she has a part in taking care of; and little boys are 
not very different from little girls in this respect, — the 
toughest ones being, as I have said, in my experience, the 
most tender toward small children. 

Our schools also should provide for the exercise of this 
instinct, not only through home and school gardens, and pets 
where that is possible, but by giving the bigger boys and 
girls some responsibility for the leadership and protection 
of the younger ones, both in the mass and in individual 
cases especially assigned. Readers of the best boy's book 
ever written will remember that the turning point in the life 
of Tom Brown was when he was given a smaller boy to look 
after. Throwing a boot at the head of a boy who under- 
took to bully his young charge was only the beginning of a 
sense of protectorship which, although its expression could 
not always be as exhilarating as in this first instance, slowly 
but surely made a man of him. 

Life is self-perpetuating in more ways than one. Sub- 
ordination to an end outside one's self, the open door to the 
vital forces both physical and spiritual, is best attainable to 
many people through service to other lives, and by all 
people largely in that way. Let us see that this door is 
opened to all our children. Blessed are the nurturers, for 
they shall grow. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

CRIME OR SPORT? 

In a story in the Christmas McClure of 1901, a boy brought 
before the police court in Chicago says, in answer to a 
question from the state's attorney : — 

" ' Yes, sir ; I ben arrested in Kansas City two years ago, 
on my birthday. Us fellers stole a watermelon to celebrate 
with. I'll bet there ain't a man in this court room that 
ain't stole melons when he was a boy. Didn't you ever 
steal a melon, your honor ? ' 

"The sudden question startled the judge and provoked a 
smile in the jury box. 

" ' Well, ah — er — I don't know but I did.' 

" ' Well, I know you did, too. An' so did every man in 
that jury. Maybe they didn't get caught at it. I did.'" 

I wonder how many of my readers would have kept out 
of the police court had all their doings become known to 
the authorities. I am sure I never knew a boy intimately 
of whom that could be said. Certainly the best boys were 
not the least likely to transgress. One of the early exploits 
of the man who, upon the whole, of those whom I have per- 
sonally known, made the deepest moral impression on 
his contemporaries, was robbing a henroost. A neighbor 
possessed a prize pullet, and he and his brother coveted their 
neighbor's hen. But (deeming perhaps that covetousness 
was a sin) they escaped from this condition by appropriating 
the fowl in question. The affair was skillfully managed, 
one boy watching against possible interruption while the 

228 



CRIME OR SPORT? 229 

other put the hen under his coat and ran. It was a neighbor 
in this case, but it is generally, I suppose, a grandmother. 
It requires less moral courage to rob one's grandmother than 
to rob a stranger, and on the whole seems to be more in 
accordance with the law of nature. The neighbor provides 
an advance and elective course ; the grandmother is a part 
of the ordinary curriculum. And one thing we should re- 
member about the city boy is that he doesn't have a grand- 
mother ; that is to say, his grandmother does not have 
greenhouses or cherry trees or a pear orchard, or even, as a 
rule, a barrel of apples. She therefore does not provide 
him with the facilities appropriate to the exercise of his 
predatory instinct : he has perforce to look elsewhere. And 
it is for us to decide where he is to look. We cannot very 
well provide him with a grandmother ; but in her absence a 
playground with opportunity to work off his superfluous 
energy, and above all to satisfy his thirst for daring exploit, 
is the most effective substitute. 

Do not let us imagine that we are going simply to eliminate 
the predatory instinct. It is an integral part of the eternal 
boy and cannot be removed without causing the death of 
the patient, or at least of the best part of him. It is not 
confined to any particular condition or climate. One day in 
Venice, on the piazza San Giovanni e Paolo, where the Col- 
leoni stands — fit patron saint of the Big Injun of all time 
— I saw a crowd of seven or eight boys come suddenly 
running across a bridge, and swoop down to where there were 
some pigeons feeding, in a formation like what military men 
call "en echelon," reminding one of an end play in football. 
The first boy ran by the pigeons, leaving them on his left, 
and had the effect of starting them up in about the same 
direction as he was going. The next boy came a little 
behind and a little to the left of the first one, and each of the 



230 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

others followed in the same relative position. One of the 
last boys, coming exactly in the track of the pigeons, put 
out his hand and grabbed one before it could get speed on, 
and tucked it under his coat ; and the whole crowd disap- 
peared down an alley as if unconscious that there were any 
pigeons in the world. The pigeons in Venice are, I believe, 
strictly protected by the law. The performance, at all 
events, was a remarkable instance of the development of 
team play under difficulties, as well as of the present-day 
working of the predatory instinct in the descendants of the 
masters of the iVdriatic. 

Or, to take an instance of an even more heroic kind, I 
read one day of some boys who, having first taken the neces- 
sary steps to secure the interest of the police, went up into 
an empty house, climbed out through a skylight, sUd down 
a slate roof to a gutter hanging sixty feet above a brick- 
paved alley, crossed the alley by a tin pipe on which the 
policemen were afraid to follow, went hand over hand along 
the gutter of the opposite building, swung themselves in, 
feet foremost, through a window, and so out upon another 
roof. The thing was a great success. They were only 
caught by the policemen and fire department surrounding 
the block and gradually searching them out. Now what 
would the feeling of the ordinary boy be in reading about 
that exploit? Would he feel "What bad boys they were to 
have stolen the bananas" — or broken Mr. Grump's windows 
or whatever else it was they did — and thank heaven that he 
was not as they were; or would he secretly admire their 
exploit and hope he had the courage to do likewise ? 

Nor is the predatory instinct confined to boyhood. Young 
men in college have been known to — not to steal, of course ; 
"convey, the wise it call," — but to "pinch," "swipe," 
"rag" miscellaneous articles that did not belong to them. 



CRIME OR SPORT? 231 

As the president of a neighboring institution has lately 
pointed out, "A wicked generation seeketh after a sign." I 
remember that even the escutcheon over the awful abode of 
the appointed guardians of the law was spirited away one 
night, and ne'er seen more save perhaps by members of 
some such organization as that which recently displayed a 
skeleton at the top of the Cambridge flagpole. And I 
remember that when I was in college — but, coming to think 
of it, there is no statute of limitations against prosecution 
for what the law, lacking as it is in the sense of humor, is 
pleased to call the "crime" of breaking and entering, and I 
do not wish to be called as a witness. These be simple 
'scapes. My readers may doubtless remember others of 
more importance; and we all, I think, can with an effort 
bring back to our minds, as if it were a dream or an echo 
from a previous state of existence, a time in which petty 
larceny and planning for the same lent an air of romance 
and mystery to our simplest acts. 

Grown-up people, with their decadent industrial ideals, 
are apt to suppose that thieving, even among the young, is 
undertaken as a business enterprise. Undoubtedly it does 
become a business in some cases, but I believe that it is 
rarely first gone into with any such practical idea. Hear 
this from St. Augustine, an accurate reporter, of the eternal 
boy as he manifested himself in Carthage fifteen centuries 
ago : " A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with 
fruit, tempting neither for color nor taste. To shake and 
rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night 
(having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our 
sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for 
our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted 
them. And this but to do what we liked only, because it 
was misliked." And of this escapade the saint tells us: 



232 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

"I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger nor 
poverty, but through a cloyedness of well-doing and a pam- 
peredness of iniquity. For I stole that of which I had enough 
and much better. Nor cared I to enjoy what I stole, but 
joyed in the theft and sin itself." And he adds a little 
later, "For if aught of those pears came within my mouth 
what sweetened it was the sin," and again, "It was the 
sport which, as it were, tickled our hearts." 

I knew a boy in Boston who exemplified the same familiar 
principle. He was a very daring boy on the playground, 
but when he went to work and could no longer perform his 
favorite stunts on the apparatus, he evidently missed that 
outlet. At all events he was arrested within a year for 
stealing a considerable amount of property from the church 
in which, in further resemblance to St. Augustine, he was 
employed. How much commercial instinct there was in the 
transaction was indicated by the fact that he sold the entire 
lot, about two hundred dollars' worth, for ten dollars. 

How little juvenile lawbreaking has to do with destitution 
as an immediate cause is partly indicated b}^ the fact that 
the arrests of boys under fifteen are about twice as many in 
summer as in winter, while destitution is about four times 
greater in winter than it is in summer. The same, however, 
is true, though to a much less extent, of crimes committed 
by older people. 

The reader may by this time be puzzled to know why I 
am so anxious to make it out that all boys are cruninals. 
I have no such intention; what I am trying to prove is 
indeed precisely the opposite. My thesis is that boys are 
not criminals, and that the fact of their committing what we 
call crimes is no evidence of their being such. Evidence 
which seems to show that every boy is a criminal only shows, 



CRIME OR SPORT? 233 

in reality, that there is something wrong in our definition of 
the term, because we all know that such a conclusion is 
absurd. 

Neither am I trying to show that our penal laws are 
wrong. In a civilized community law and order must be 
upheld. Life could not go on if no man's property were 
safe from wanton injury and depredation. Nor would it 
be any kindness to the boy to let him grow up with ideas 
and habits incompatible with the existence of those institu- 
tions among which he has got to live. Boyhood is par 
excellence the time for learning : it is the time during which, 
if ever, outer conditions must impress themselves upon the 
mind. If the boy does not learn the existence and solidity 
of social institutions now, when he is a boy, he never will. 
There is no use in pretending that property rights are matters 
of indifference, or that our pear orchard is his pear orchard 
if he chooses to regard it so. The awakening would come 
some day just the same — only it would come too late. I 
am not, therefore, saying that there should be a feeble or 
apologetic enforcement of property and other rights as 
against the boy's impulse to infringe. It may be true that 
in some matters our law is too harsh — it may be, for in- 
stance, that lead pipe which the owner chooses to abandon 
in a house with broken doors and windows, as a temptation 
to every poor boy in the neighborhood, ought to be put on 
the free list — but in general our law, or its administration, 
is as apt to err in the direction of leniency as upon the op- 
posite side. 

What I do maintain is that, although we find it necessary 
to uphold the law of the grown-up world as against the 
boy's attempts to override it, we should at the same time 
remember that the boy's law is a natural law to him, and 
that, whatever else he is, he is not a criminal for obeying it. 



234 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

There is to a certain extent an irrepressible conflict between 
our modern industrial civilization and the earlier, barbaric 
and predatory society to which the boy naturally belongs. 
Our task is primarily not repression, but guidance; not 
punishment, but teaching. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 

To teach we must first understand. We must search our 
way back from that manifestation of the eternal boy which 
is disagreeable to us until we find its source in his nature — • 
understand just what it represents to him. I believe we 
shall then see that, like all primal human tendencies, the 
original impulse that produces lawlessness is good and not 
evil. Certainly it is not a lawless impulse. It is as far as 
possible from being that. What drives the boy to the 
breaking of our law is precisely the best thing in him, his 
very self and conscience. His criminality under our statute 
is obedience to a law that is in him by a higher authority 
than ours, a law that is of the essence of his being, that 
existed a thousand centuries before St. Augustine and will 
continue in effect so long as there are boys on this earth. 
It is not a perverted or a degenerate impulse that makes a 
boy commit these acts of daring lawlessness. It is, on the 
contrary, a virtue, universally recognized as such in the boy 
world, and that was equally recognized in the grown-up 
world until within a very recent period. 

The especial form of the law which the Big Injun is obey- 
ing in his lawbreaking our study of his games has largely 
shown. Partly it is the law of hunting or escape : the 
French word escapade is founded on a true psychology. 

A favorite story of Phillips Brooks — although I am not 
sure that it ought to be cited in cold print — was of a small 
boy whom he saw standing on tiptoe attempting to ring the 

235 



236 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

doorbell of a city house. I like to imagine the child as a 
sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy, an innocent angel face with 
starry eyes, long dark lashes, and golden curls. Mr. Brooks, 
seeing what was wanted, kindly mounted the steps and 
pulled the bell, and then, turning to the boy, asked, "And 
now what have we got to do?" to which the boy answered, 
"Now run like hell!" Of course the success of this urchin 
in securing as his accomplice the most distinguished preacher 
in the New World was more than he had any right to expect 
or could, in all probability, have appreciated if he had known 
it. But the essential point, and what aroused the evident 
S}Tnpathy w^ith which Mr. Brooks told the story, is that it 
was not properly an instinct for mere troublesomeness that 
was at the bottom of the whole performance. The boy was 
not primarily interested in the discomfort he was giving his 
elders, but in the lively and altogether pleasing reaction 
that he could produce in them, with its appropriate mani- 
festations in the hastening step, the agitated fist, and frown- 
ing visage. Tag is a good game in any case, but it is more 
of a sporting event when the avenger of the outraged bell 
wire is behind than when the interest of the pursuer arises 
merely from the fact that he is "it." Lawbreaking in 
such instances is simply a more realistic form of an ancient 
and universal game. 

And in general it is not primarily to cause annoyance 
that the small child does so many unpleasant and inconven- 
ient things, although he has no morbid objection to doing 
so when the higher interests require it. Nor are even the 
pleasing reactions of his elders under treatment the final 
object. These are incidental benefits, by-products like 
the beauty of the rose or the scent of the June fields ; their 
value is not in themselves but as testimonials to the reality 
of the exploit that called them forth. As it is the loudest 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 237 

noise that is most convincing, so also is the most troublesome 
effect. Trouble conferred, indeed, is an especially convenient 
measure of achievement, securing as it does the testimony of 
witnesses the most adverse to the actuality of the thing 
accomplished ; but it is not in itself an especially important 
end. 

Sometimes lawbreaking is a form of I spy, being based 
upon the instinct of foray, as in raids on groceries or pear 
orchards. Sometimes it rivals football as a reproduction of 
tribal war, as in battles of neighboring gangs. Largely, 
as has been already suggested, it expresses the instinct of 
curiosity, which urges the inquiring mind to experiment 
upon our statutes and prohibitions to see which of them 
ring true and which are sham. 

But the form of the impulse that underlies the child's 
lawbreaking is not so important to us as its essence. And 
in considering its essence, it has to be admitted that, although 
the impulse itself is as far as possible from being lawless in 
the true sense, although it is authentic law to him, proceeding 
from the authoritative source of all morality in his own 
conscience, yet there are within it tendencies definitely op- 
posed to the observance of our grown-up statutes, and in a 
sense ro all external laws and regulations whatsoever. 

In the first place the child has a certain negative tendency 
to lawlessness. An important source of his lawbreaking 
is the absence, or rudimentary development, in him of 
certain of the ideas that control the morality of grown-up 
people. The industrial and civilized virtues have not yet 
received their growth. The importance of property rights 
in especial, as applying to the community at large, have 
not yet been brought home. Above all, the belonging 
instinct, parent of all social obligation, has not fully ap- 



238 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

peared; and when it does appear, it does not for a long 
time include the grown-up world. The first instinctive 
membership is in the gang, to which all outsiders are hostes 
— foreigners whom it is a duty to pillage and harass. It 
is especially this absence in him of some of the moral require- 
ments recognized in the world in which he finds himself, 
and the failure of grown people to make allowance for it, 
that gives rise to much of the misunderstanding between 
the child and his elders, and often makes him feel that it 
is hopeless to expect any grown person to know anything 
important about him or his ambitions, or to take a truly 
rational view of any subject. 

The child in fact lives in a different world from ours: a 
world of personal courage, of hunting, fighting, and adven- 
ture ; the world of the swift-footed Achilles, of the Vikings, 
of Nimrod, "a mighty hunter before the Lord"; a world 
from which our world of humdrum commercial ideals is 
still invisible. He feels toward our bourgeois morality much 
as Rob Roy felt toward the civilian virtues of his kinsman. 
Bailie Nicol Jarvie. His sentiments are those of Sir 
Lucius O'Trigger : " Do you think that Achilles or my 
little Alexander the Great ever inquired where the right 
lay? No, by my soul, they drew their broad swords and 
left the lazy sons of peace to settle the justice of it." 

It is not, in fine, all the virtues of manhood that it is the 
child's business to cultivate, but only the prunal ones. Not 
the whole of man, but largely the warlike part, is what first 
unfolds. The Big Injun age is the time for the development 
of what Plato calls the spirited quality, the lion that is an 
essential part of character — not indeed the ruler, but the 
ever present and obedient servant, ready at the call of the 
highest principle or "reason." It is the warlike age; what 
may be, under favorable circumstances, the age of chivalry. 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 239 

And then, upon the positive side, there are certain in- 
stincts in the chikl that constitute what often amounts to 
a moral obhgation to break our law. Back of the whole 
obsession for daring exploit is the fighting instinct, often 
in its primitive form, the form in which virtue — virtus, 
the quality of being a man — receives its first, indispensable, 
and most central growth. It is the call of the eternal hero 
in the youth that compels him from soft and easy ways, 
and such as are of good repute among his maiden aunts, to 
venture on the exploits for which we blame him. It is the 
boy's determination to overcome — utterly to ignore, rout, 
and insult — the coward in himself that, when opportunity 
for hard games is lacking, drives him to lawbreaking. Sir 
Launcelot rides forth every day upon our city streets, and 
next morning the judge says, "Twenty days." 

In preaching to the boy, and setting before him for his 
admiration, only such virtues as he cannot by any possi- 
bility understand or emulate, we are preaching thrift and 
industry to the wild Indian or the Highland cateran. The 
boy is not a grown man, and it is not proper that he should 
suddenly become one. 

And beneath all other causes of juvenile lawbreaking there 
is the great commandment of the Big Injun age : Thou 
shalt assert thyself. The child's original creative life has 
begun to stir in him ; or rather it has now reached the con- 
scious and outputting stage ; it has boiled up to the sur- 
face, taken possession of his consciousness, and set forth 
upon the conquest of the world. Here it suddenly finds 
the ground has been preempted : its native tendencies are 
met with prohibitions; the orchards are fenced in, the 
brooks preserved, the very shops where anything interesting 
happens are marked "keep out." And these prohibitions 
are largely in the interests of a civilization whose springs of 



240 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

action he cannot understand. More questionable still — 
a direct challenge to his new intuition of autonomy — his 
elders, in addition to all these prohibitions, impose upon 
him positive commands, not only confining his liberty within 
narrow bounds but depriving him of it altogether by prescrib- 
ing just what he shall do ; they even assume a general and 
unlunited authority over hun. 

How shall he reconcile implicit obedience to such require- 
ments with his new and precious instinct to be free ? How 
answer to the dread judge within if at the end of each day 
he must report that he has done nothing in obedience to 
the inner law, struck no blow in behalf of the spirit to which 
his whole allegiance is due? The child has naturally a 
great respect for established custom and authority. He 
is by nature docile, supplied, as I have said, with special 
instincts — of imitation and of membership — which in- 
cline him to accept the domination of his elders. But his 
docility is not absolute and unconditional. It does not 
extend to an abdication of his own soul when once he has 
become conscious of its voice. It is thus his duty to disobey 
your law when it is plainly contrary to his own, as when it 
denies all exercise of the warlike virtues. If your preach- 
ments and your prohibitions would strangle the manly 
life as it wells up in him, it is for him a matter of life and 
death to disregard them. 

There is even a moral necessity of disobedience as such. 
If a child always does what he is told, how does he know 
that he is not doing it merely because he is told? Do his 
own true inspirations and his parents' or teachers' orders 
always coincide ; are they always even compatible ? Better 
disobey occasionally, simply as a matter of principle, just 
to assure yourself that you are not an automaton, but a 
being with a moral responsibility that you cannot delegate. 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 241 

St. Augustine — great psychologist that he is upon this as 
on so many other matters — asks, even of his pear stealing ; 
"Did I wish even by stealth to do contrary to thy law, 
because by power I could not, so that being a prisoner, I 
might mimic a maimed liberty by doing with impunity 
things unpermitted me, a darkened likeness of thy Omnipo- 
tency?" Does any wise parent or teacher wish for children 
who never disobey ? Will these make the strongest men and 
women, such as can be trusted to render at the end a good 
account of the especial talent that was given them ? I do not 
mean that parents and elders should lie down and let them- 
selves be trampled on. Such is far too much their attitude 
already. Social laws and institutions are real and necessary, 
and must be upheld : your abdicating your own duty will 
not help your child in learning his. But be not cast down 
if he does not always understand, and rejoice if in such case 
he dares assert the value of his own idea. The rebel soul 
is not a rebel against the divine order : more often it is its 
champion, and the conflict is due to some perverted view 
on his part — or on yours. 

Never believe, whatever the evidence superficially con- 
sidered may seem to show, that the child's impulse of self- 
assertion, chief source of his apparent lawlessness, is ever 
in truth lawless. It is on the contrary the most lawful 
thing there is. It is the voice of nature coming from as 
deep down in him as you can get, issuing from all that 
conscience, personality, truth, can mean for him — the voice 
of the eternal as it crops out in his individual soul. The law 
that he obeys is not of his own making. The seemingly 
unaccountable action he comes out with is not wanton, but 
inexorably prescribed, no more of his choosing than of yours 
— except as he may choose to disobey the voice and leave 
his life to that extent unrealized. What impels him to come 



242 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

out at all hazards with some word or deed that shall be all his 
own is the dim conviction that this as yet formless and inartic- 
ulate self of his is authoritative, that it is a new thing under 
the sun, and that, however despised and disregarded by others, 
it is not in truth despicable but worthy of infinite respect. 
He knows that he bears within himself a new and authentic 
revelation of the law, a revelation which it is his business now 
and evermore to declare. 

The boy knows also in a dim way — although he could 
never so express the matter even to himself — that with 
him, with the vital part of him, it is now or never ; that if 
he is ever to grow up to be a man, is ever to develop the 
fundamental qualities of address, courage, manliness, he 
must do it now ; that with him as with every growing thing 
there is a time for the bud, a time for the flower, and a time 
for the fruit, and that, the time once past, the growth it was 
meant to bring will not take place. He could not put his 
conviction into words, but that is what he means by his 
insistence upon the assertion of his individuality, if not 
successfully, then with such blurting out as he can com- 
pass ; if not in lawful ways, then in such other ways as he 
can find. 

Let us respect, not thwart or look askance upon, the decree 
of nature and the boy who is being true to it. He is acting 
under the impulse of forces of whose import he is uncon- 
scious, but upon his obedience to which his whole success 
and worthiness depend. His loyalty throughout the ages 
to the god of nature speaking within him, in the face of the 
almost uniform discouragement of his elders, has been al- 
together admirable. In spite of constant punishment and 
lack of sympathy, and, more remarkable still, in spite of his 
meager opportunity in our modern cities, he has been true 
to the work that has been intrusted to him — the develop- 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 243 

ment within himself of the virtues of courage and address 
and the driUing of mind and muscle in their service. 

Some noise in the world it is required of every child that 
he shall make. Let those who care that it shall be an agree- 
able noise look to it ; with that matter he will not much con- 
cern himself. It is up to us, utterly our responsibility, to 
see what issue this ultimate necessity, this best in him, shall 
have. To him the difference between lawbreaking and 
other games of daring is not yet clear. What is clear is 
that he must dare or renounce his soul. That is to him the 
paramount moral fact. To him both doors are labeled 
"manhness." It is for us, who know where each door leads, 
to decide which shall remain open and which shall be closed. 

And be not too scornful toward the mental limitations of 
the boy who has chosen lawbreaking as his means of self- 
announcement. He could cite a goodly array of authorities 
in favor of his choice. The Spartans — within their chosen 
limits as successful educators as the world has seen — made 
stealing a part of their regular curriculum. Caesar says of 
the Germans : " Robberies which are committed beyond 
the boundaries of each city bear no infamy, and they avow 
that these are committed for the purpose of disciplining 
their youth and of preventing sloth ;" and judging from the 
literature of the English boarding school, it would seem 
that its rules are made not to be kept but to be broken, — 
for the sake of the training afforded by rule-breaking con- 
sidered as a game. 

The unimaginative grown-up, parent or other, thinks 
(and I have admitted that he has much evidence on his side) 
that the Big Injun child likes giving trouble for its own sake, 
just as the same person thinks that the smaller child likes 
dirt. But — just as the small child seeks the gutter not in 



244 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

order to get dirty, but from the need of some material that 
he can handle — so in the case of his bigger brother evil is 
not his good, nor is being a nuisance simply its own reward. 
What he unconsciously seeks, and what he must have if he 
is ever to grow up, is opportunity to develop certain funda- 
mental virtues. There is an element of sport in some kinds 
of mischief, and it is in this element that lies its attraction 
to the child. What he wants is a hard, lively game : some- 
thing difficult, dangerous, heroic. This he must have as 
truly as a flower must have air and sun. If he cannot get 
it in one way, it is his virtue and not his vice that he insists 
on getting it in another ; in so doing he is being true to the 
god within. 

An everlasting text of the funny man is that it is the 
bad boys, and not the good ones, who turn out well. And 
there is everlasting truth behind this theory, the very simple 
explanation being that it is the bad boys who are good. 
It is the boys whom we call bad, because their actions are 
frequently inconvenient to their elders, who are being true 
to their own nature, are doing that specific part of the work 
of self-development which it is their business to do. 

The whole question of juvenile lawbreaking — or at 
least nine tenths of it — is thus a question of children's 
play. A child who breaks the law is, in nine cases out of 
ten, not a criminal. He is obeying an instinct that is not 
only legitimate but vital, and which, if it finds every lawful 
channel choked up, will seek an outlet at the next available 
point. If there is a man clothed in dignity and a blue coat 
especially hired to chase you if you will only take the 
necessary means to gain his interest, — and if there is noth- 
ing else to do, — it is a flying in the face of Providence 
not to make the most of what fortune so considerately sends. 
But tag is not the only game, and the policeman is not the 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 245 

only one who knows it. Nor is the irate grocery man his 
only substitute. Give a boy a chance at football, basket- 
ball, hockey, or "the game"; give him an opportunity 
to perform difficult and dangerous feats on a horizontal 
bar, on the flj'ing rings, or from a diving board, — and the 
policeman will need a gymnasium himself to keep his weight 
down. This is not theory, but is the testimony you will 
get from any policeman, schoolmaster, or social worker who 
has been in a neighborhood before and after a playground 
was started there. 

Is play a necessity ? Yes, if the child lives and is a whole 
child. If he is above ground, and the best part has not been 
starved quite out of him, play there is certain to be, if not 
in one form, then, in another. 

The "boy problem," as we call it, is really the grown-up 
problem. The boy is all right. He breaks our laws, but 
he does so in obedience to a law that is older than ours, a 
law that has never failed to get its way or else impose a 
penalty — and to collect it. The penalty, as is the way with 
such, is collected of the victim. It is being collected now 
in our jails and penitentiaries, in weakened and perverted 
lives — the normal and inevitable results of allowing the 
best force that Nature has put into the child, the force 
that was meant to make a man of him, to go to waste or be 
turned into abnormal or anti-social channels. 

Against the deeper law it is we who are the transgressors. 
When "the children were left out in the planning of our 
cities," when we closed nature's path against the growing 
child, we made it mathematically certain that he should 
seek some other path or cease to grow. If opportunity for 
play is denied, and by just so far as it is denied, stunting 
and perversion are the absolutely inevitable results. 



CHAPTER XXX 

PLAY IS PURPOSEFUL 

About as interesting an experience as there is, is to see a 
baby when he first finds his hands. He has for a long time 
seen those white clouds passing across his sky and paid no 
great attention to them, when suddenly one day his hand 
stops its apparently aimless waving, and he looks at it in a 
way he never looked at anything before. He moves it a 
little, still watching it with all his eyes. Then presently, 
becoming exhausted with his observations, he dismisses it 
and the whole subject from his mind for that occasion, to 
be taken up again however and repeated until the experience 
has become a familiar one. Just think what is taking place 
at that moment in the child's mind. He has found for the 
first time that he can influence events ; that he — this 
creature that squeals and grunts and kicks its legs and 
goes Aa, Aa — can control the motions of outside phenom- 
ena ; that the cloud will stop or move according to some- 
thing he does about it. There is happening before your 
eyes the most interesting event in the history of the world, 
namely, the discovery by a conscious being that he also is 
a cause, that he can affect the arrangement of the universe, 
that he is a producer of results. In the story of the child 
and his growth the experience is a decisive one. From that 
time forward the producing of results will be his main, 
absorbing, business. 

Next to the child's simple moving of his hands comes the 
wielding impulse, when he wants to control other things, 

246 



PLAY IS PURPOSEFUL 247 

and make them move according as he chooses. Aristotle 
remarks, speaking of children about six years old, that 
"the rattle of Archimedes is good for children of this age." 
The important thing about the rattle is that it celebrates 
the event, makes a noise in the world, appeals to the sense 
of hearing as well as to that of sight to emphasize results 
obtained. A similar virtue is found by grown people in 
the automobile, which appeals also to the sense of smell. 

But sounds and motions are writ on air and vanish ; soon 
the soul thirsts for more permanent effects. An epoch 
opens when the child makes his first cake — squeezes moist 
sand between his hands and then peeks in and sees that it 
retains his impress and superscription. And so on to the 
making of pies and palaces, to the whole chapter of creative 
play. 

It has been said that the difference between play and 
work is that work is for an ulterior object, while play is for 
itself. What truth there is in this distinction depends upon 
the word "ulterior" ; for play is almost always for an object. 
If we say the satisfaction of the play is in the doing of it, 
we must also say that "it" is not the motions gone through, 
the process of the playing, but the end sought. It is on the 
end that the .child's heart and mind are set. It absorbs 
his attention, gives meaning and motive. He is all inten- 
tion : seeking the end is what he is doing, and the whole 
of it. That is the act as it is to him the actor. 

Watch a child building a tower of blocks. Note his 
increasing an'xiety as its equilibrium becomes more unstable, 
the sublime daring required in adding the last block. He is 
not thinking about himself, not conscious that he is there 
at all ; his whole being is absorbed into the work in hand. 
It is not he that is building the blocks : the blocks are build- 
ing him. The tower rules ; the child is utterly subordinate ; 



248 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

he hardly breathes until the thing is done. He is all builder ; 
there is nothing over, not enough even to know that he is 
doing it. Such a child is not interested in grasping the 
blocks, raising them to a certain height, moving them hori- 
zontally and then downward. He is not interested in the 
process ; he is not in the truest sense going through the pro- 
cess at all. What he is doing is building the tower, accom- 
plishing the end. The process, as a result of such intention, 
enacts itself. 

Or observe any of the hunting games and note the utter 
concentration on results. These games involve many 
motions — of running, dodging, climbing, jumping, and so 
forth — but these are not their object from the children's 
point of view. The thing is to get away. Run till you 
drop, if running seems the best expedient. But climb, 
swim, hide in the coal cellar, roll down the bank, or jump from 
the second-story window — any way to get off. That is 
how they look at it. The terror of being caught is the mo- 
tive, or the passion of pursuit, with the one object to capture 
or escape. 

And so in the later, team games, attention is always on 
the end — making the hit, putting the man out, getting 
the ball over the line. I do not now refer to the spirit of 
"anything to win." Where this involves going outside of 
the game and winning by means not contemplated in the 
rules, it means the choice of a certain sort of end and con- 
stitutes a special manifestation of the competitive instinct. 
What I am here emphasizing is the fact that subordination 
to an end is the essential characteristic of the play spirit 
itself in its more important manifestations. 

It is true that there are often special means prescribed. 
Most notable of these are the instances already cited of the 
instincts to throw at a mark and to strike with a stick or 



PLAY IS PURPOSEFUL 249 

weapon of some sort, upon which our ball games are so largely 
built. But even in these cases it is, from the child's point 
of view, the end that governs. The boy wants, it is true, 
to throw with his right arm; but when he does throw it is 
not his right arm that interests him, but the friend, window, 
first baseman, or other convenient and satisfying object that 
he is throwing at. He wants to strike with a stick, but it 
is not the flourishing of the bat that governs, but the hitting 
of the ball — even beyond that, he cares a good deal where 
he hits it to and with what result. Often, indeed, he will 
express himself as wholly dissatisfied when he has made a 
very pretty and vigorous motion with the bat if the desired 
connection with the ball did not occur. He may want to 
do the thing in a certain prescribed way ; but it is the doing 
of the thing, not the method used, on which his mind is 
bent. All his faculties are focused on this end. Every 
tissue, every drop of blood, prays and travails that it shall 
be attained. 

This purposeful character of play was well illustrated by 
a little girl whom I watched as she learned to creep. She 
had great difficulty in acquiring the first rudiments of loco- 
motion, but she finally solved the problem by means of a 
rattle which she was very fond of and which she would throw 
just beyond her reach and then find that somehow she could 
get to it. It was the rattle that pulled her there. The 
end in view released the power to act. 

That the instinct for the end lies deeper than the pre- 
scription of the means, and is even independent of it, seems 
to be directly proved by the instinctive satisfaction in kick- 
ing goals, in throwing a goal with both hands as in basket 
ball, instead of with the right alone, or in hitting a mark 
with an arrow or a bullet. The man who used to paint with 
his toes in European galleries illustrated the possibility of 



250 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

another issue of the manipulating impulse than the first 
instinctive one. So men will satisfy the instinct of song by 
means of a hollow reed, or by strings of wire or catgut. They 
will sing in stone and wood or through colors spread on can- 
vas. Conversely they will find building materials in musi- 
cal sounds, in poetry, in institutions. 

Nature cares something for the means but much more 
for the end. She is of a very Philistine or get-there tempera- 
ment. Her constant precept is, "Thou shalt arrive." Get 
the thing done, get the ball over the line — gracefully, pleas- 
antly, politely, if you can, but get it there. To succeed in 
life we need to get results, and it is on results that Nature 
focuses mind and emotion from the first. 

To the child play is always the seeking of the end. The 
motions made are known to him (if at all) only as means 
toward the result, wholly governed and irradiated by it. 
A cross section of a game, or a photographic view giving 
the motions the child makes, does not show the real play 
at all. To him it is seen not crosswise but end-on, and the 
object that closes the vista of each act absorbs his whole 
attention, A game is a complete transaction, self-contained, 
squaring the account, not needing external compensation 
or reward. Play is achievement, the service of ends that 
justify themselves and the means of serving them. 

Nature in her mode of education has never adopted the 
pedagogue's plan of teaching the grammar first and coming 
to actual speech only after years of preparation, if at all. 
The child's first syllable or act has a full meaning, is a whole 
story in itself, be it long or short. His play is to him not 
a preparation for something else, but in itself an experience 
wholly worth while. The reason' boys break down under 
training for an athletic event is because training is no longer 
play. It has become self-conscious, the end is in self-per- 



PLAY IS PURPOSEFUL 251 

fection, not in the immediate game, and is unnatural to 
them in consequence. 

It is by this same method that Nature always works. 
The way she makes a tree is not to begin forty feet under- 
ground, gradually build up the roots — " lay a good founda- 
tion" — until she gets to the surface, then erect a solid 
trunk, thrust out the various branches of learning, and then, 
one hundred years after the start, bring out her first leaf. 
She begins m medias res, on the ground, at the level of ac- 
tion, and thrusts down a root, and a leaf up to balance it. 
It is a tree from the beginning, and a whole one. That 
is the very formula of growth. It is a whole tree from the 
beginning, a whole deed from the very start. In the same 
way the child begins with the end, with doing something. 
Growth mostly starts not as physiologists say it ought to, 
with exercising the big muscles, but from the hand, the point 
of utterance; and gradually, as the achievement blossoms 
up higher, the foundation strikes back deeper into the child's 
being ; but always he is doing something — a thing worth 
while from his point of view. 

So the characteristic of the most usual kind of play is 
subordination, subservience to an end. It is not that tlie 
child chooses to play, but that the end prescribed in play 
chooses the child, becomes his conscious purpose, and adapts 
him to itself. He is given up, absorbed into it. Man is 
the child of purpose, the servant of prescribed ends, by the 
original and ingrained habit of his mind. 

The training that play supplies is thus training in the 
moral attitude of man ; for to seek results, focus attention 
not on going through the motions but on getting the thing 
done, is the condition and necessary form of all morality. 

The drill in subordination that play supplies is more in- 
tense than can be provided in any other way. Gymnastic 



252 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

exercises for the extensor muscles of the arm may bring out 
the power that is there; but pitching for the home team 
brings out a power that was not there, that existed only in 
the boy's heart and in the heart of the team he represents. 
The play purpose exalts to its own level. The child throws 
himself into his game up to the very limits of his courage 
and perseverance — beyond the limits hitherto set, for the 
game is itself the very act of growth. He follows the ball 
each day further into the unexplored regions of potential 
character, and comes back each evening a larger moral 
being than he set forth. His whole nature is trained in 
this discipline, run into the mold that nature has therein 
prescribed. 

The purposefulness of play develops especially during 
the Big Injun age. The passion for reality that governs 
this stage of growth implies subordination to the laws of 
real acomplishment. To be real, to do real things, you 
must set your heart on your object and see only that. But 
the attitude, though it receives its great development during 
this period, dates further back, as we have seen. Man is 
by his nature a seeker of results almost from the very first. 

Without a recognition of the purposeful character of chil- 
dren's play we cannot appreciate its vital function in their 
growth. Hitherto we have considered mainly the direction 
of the play impulses ; now it is a question of their method 
— of the mood and temper of the action they prescribe. 
Upon that mood will depend the sort of being they create, 
not now as to bodily and spiritual shape, but as to make and 
fiber. For in the growth of the living thing there is a law 
of texture as well as a law of form. All flesh is not the same 
flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh 
of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds. Besides 
the shape of the tree — the number, slant, and arrangement 



PLAY IS PURPOSEFUL 253 

of its branches — there is the question of the sort of wood, 
its grain and consistency, varying all the way from poplar 
to the ancient wind-blown cedar on the cliff. 

And where growth is by action, the texture of the life 
attained, its timbre and resonance, will depend upon the sort 
of action through which it has accrued, just as its form will 
depend upon the ends to which the action is directed. Hunt- 
ing, fighting, nurturing play, determine that the product 
shall be a hunter, fighter, nurturer — and so on ; but what 
sort of hunter, and the rest? That must depend upon the 
mood in which the play is carried on. Each day will leave 
its mark ; and the fiber of the man, whether firm or pliable 
— what his intimate quality shall be — will depend on the 
spirit of the game. I think we may be confident, for in- 
stance, that a hard game will give a firm-wrought fabric, 
tough, hard wove ; a loose and easy game will leave a flimsy 
one. And so also we may believe that a purposeful attitude 
will produce a spiritual body in which each cell and tissue 
is charged with intention, attuned to the seeking of ends. 
As the leaf is the unit of plant life, and every tree a structure 
built of leaves, so is purpose the unit of man, and every 
human spirit an edifice of inwoven purposes. 

Thus the law of the play-built creature is the law of pur- 
pose. He is a hunter whose heart is set, not on hiding, 
running, leaping — not on healthful exercise — but on the 
taking of the game ; a maker lost in the thing he makes, 
who will give all he has to finish it ; a nurturer, citizen, who 
forgets his own life in the service of the life he loves. To 
play is to be the servant of an end. 



CHAPTER XXXI 

PLAY IS THE SERVICE OF IDEALS 

A CHILD playing is absorbed into the end he seeks. What 
is the nature of that end ? 

In the first place, it should be said, the child's purpose 
is seldom if ever the same as Nature's. She has not intrusted 
him with her whole plan, nor told him why she has made 
such or such an act appear desirable. He has no concep- 
tion that he is training himself to be a man — or at least 
not until a later stage than that which we are now consider- 
ing. The sight of his friend is to him simply an invitation 
to the chase or contest ; the tree suggests climbing, the brook 
a swim, the squirrel a shot with a snowball — with no hint 
of remoter advantages to be attained. So in our maturer 
play pictures and symphonies are to us simply and ultimately 
desirable, regardless of whatever purpose Nature may have 
had in giving us a feeling of rhythm and balance and a sen- 
sibility to certain sequences and tones. 

But Nature, though she does not intrust the child with 
her whole purpose from the start, — and perhaps never 
with her final and inclusive purpose, whatever that may be, 
— does prescribe to him, at each stage of his development, 
purposes not only so weighted as to make them adequate 
and final motives for his action, but such as are the most 
inclusive that he is then able to achieve. And as soon as he 
can follow them she prescribes to him the full-blown purposes 
that are to govern his adult life. Wielding succeeds grasp- 
ing as soon as the child has learned to hold things in his 

254 



PLAY IS THE SERVICE OF IDEALS 255 

hand ; pounding supersedes mere brandishing, using the 
stick as a tool follows close on pounding. Then come 
building, molding, creation. So walking takes the place 
of kicking as soon as his legs can hold him up ; chasing fol- 
lows walking, tag supplants chasing, and football conquers 
tag. Each successive exercise has for the child its own suffi- 
cient end ; but as soon as possible the final, inclusive end is 
introduced and the mind becomes focused on the sort of 
object that is designed to govern the grown man. 

(I speak here and elsewhere of Nature's "purposes" simply 
as a convenient way of referring to the results that natural 
processes do actually bring about, without intending to 
put forth any opinion as to whether Nature does have or 
represent any conscious purposes or not.) 

The play purpose is not the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure 
results from play, and may in the sophisticated become a 
conscious motive, but it is not the play motive. It is extrane- 
ous, a by-product; it does not in any way account for the 
play attitude or the direction of the play instincts. In 
play the motive of the act is the doing of it ; the child will 
know afterwards that he was having a good time, and may 
choose to play again partly for that reason; but pleasure 
will never be the present motive in the play itself. In suc- 
cessful play a child does not know that he is having a good 
time ; he does not know that he is having a time at all ; time, 
in fact, has ceased along with self-consciousness. He is 
not a receiver of impressions, but a doer, pure and simple, 
and exists for nothing else. The pursuit of pleasure is an 
egotistic, self-conscious, almost a morbid, state of mind, 
notoriously self-defeating. Play implies the opposite, con- 
trasted attitude, that of self-forgetfulness, subordination. 
The man who goes out to have a good time is usually dis- 



256 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

appointed. The one who goes out to play the game, and 
does play it for all it is worth, is never w^holly so. 

Play involves pain. You cannot become lost in the 
achievement of an end without some disregard of the sacri- 
fice involved. You cannot play the game unless you learn 
to ignore the kicks and the fatigue. Young men even kill 
themselves in games; and readiness for such sacrifice as 
the end may call for is fundamental in the moral attitude 
of play. 

And the play purposes, though they are the child's own, 
and are to him satisfying motives for the acts prescribed, 
are not selfish, and are as far as possible from representing 
whim. A child's play is in a true sense self-assertion, but 
it is the assertion of a self deeper than the individual; its 
purposes are largely race purposes, and are wholly extra- 
personal, independent of his private will ; they are purposes 
that have chosen him, not he them. True he gratifies him- 
self in following these purposes. Such is indeed the road to 
the highest happiness attainable by man, the happiness of 
the scientist who has followed truth, the artist who has been 
true to his vision, the soldier who has fought the good fight. 
But let us not get our feet entangled in this old childish 
quibble of the selfishness of being true to one's better self. 
We could not serve the best if its commands did not apply 
to us. And the voice that commands rejoices in us when 
we win. But it is not the devil's voice for all that, and no- 
body who plays the game ever thinks it is. There are in 
every man two selves, or two poles of self, one authoritative, 
the other secondary ; one representing the eternal, the other 
the transient. It is the former that speaks in the play 
purposes. 

It is true the voice is different in each individual. But 
it is not private or selfish on that account. The oak de- 



PLAY IS THE SERVICE OF IDEALS 257 

mands of each leaf its special service, and will not be quite 
itself if that service is denied : but the demand comes from 
the oak, not from the leaf. Or if there are laws not of the 
whole but of the individual alone, they are nevertheless 
laws, not whim, laid down for him, not of his choosing. Origi- 
nality itself, new and creative act, for those who believe 
in such, is of divine, not selfish origin. It is the last best 
word in him that the individual utters therein — an utter- 
ance not won save as all there is of him is attuned to the 
highest note he has. 

Subordinatic. , not selfishness, is the characteristic of 
true play — subordination to an extra-personal end, and the 
bending of the mind and faculties to its accomplishment. 
To play is to place yourself utterly at the disposal of the 
object that not your whim but the play instinct has pre- 
scribed. 

The subordination prescribed in play is subordination to 
outer as well as to inner requirements. Not as the boy 
feels like running, but as the dodging of the pursued or the 
necessities of flight prescribe ; not as he would like to win, 
but as the unsympathetic retaliation of his opponent dic- 
tates ; not wholly as his eager soul had planned, but as the 
obdurate material requires — such must be his law if he is 
truly to serve the hunting, competing, and creative instincts. 
Dry sand will not hold its shape, round stones present a 
steady structure, nor a tower of blocks survive a certain angle, 
out of deference to any rage or grief of his. There is no sym- 
pathy — not even a sense of humor, unless of a diabolic 
sort — to be found among these obdurate outside phenom- 
ena. If he loves a flower or a kitten, he can neither make 
the one grow nor keep the other as his friend except by ob- 
servance of laws not made for his convenience. Meantime 



258 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the steady mandate of the play impulse to attain the end 
enforces his submission to the hard conditions thus imposed. 
He can realize his desire only through obedience to outer 
and inexorable laws. For not merely to have and inwardly 
celebrate a purpose, but to carry it out, to go forth and 
stamp it visibly upon the outer world, is the fixed re- 
quirement. To the Big Injun especially has come the 
conviction that he must thus conquer outside things, and 
force their submission and acknowledgment. He must 
convince stone and wood and iron and fire and water and 
his own companions, secure their affidavit to his validity. 

At first, indeed, a very crude response from the material 
dealt with will suffice, provided always that it be plainly 
audible. His first desire is simply that Nature shall speak 
up and report the deed, so that all, himself especially, may 
hear and be convinced. Hence, presenting in its lowest 
terms the play mood of service to an end, there appears 
a sort of general instinct-for-results, the "joy in being a 
cause" already mentioned. Hence the love of the rattle, 
with its heralding of infant prowess, standing next the hobby 
as the proverbial plaything. We all like rattles, and it is 
their rattling we like — the louder the better, so long as we 
give the shake. Hence the child's love of loud noises and 
of all striking and obvious results : hence one motive in 
his playing with fire and gunpowder, in his blowing of tin 
horns or rolling a bowlder down a hill. To pound on a tray 
or bathtub, to drum and whistle and sing, to rustle your 
feet along through the dry leaves, to run in a jumping way 
so as to make the daisy buds click against your boots, — 
these and many more such are of the sort of actions found 
desirable. Children like, for this among other reasons, to 
drag a piece of tin with a string along the sidewalk ; and if 
you have a cart, it is a distinct advantage that it should 



PLAY IS THE SERVICE OF IDEALS 259 

rattle a good deal or that its wheel should squeak. Squeaky 
boots, even, are a boon, proclaiming the triumphal march 
of the hero, making his every progress almost a procession 
in itself. 

And in every sort of play a striking result adds to the 
satisfaction. Boys throw stones at a bottle rather than at 
a board because it more tragically proclaims success. Win- 
dows are better still because of the social value of the catas- 
trophe. I think it is not a negligible accessory in tennis 
that the scoring is fifteen, thirty, forty, instead of one, two, 
three : it helps to make you feel that you are getting some- 
where. Cards would be less fascinating if they were simply 
numbered up to thirteen instead of dealing with the royal 
family. 

But though crude results satisfy at first, and though we 
are always too easily paid off by such, they do not perma- 
nently and truly satisfy. The child who has made his first 
cake will look at it a few moments very seriously ; then some 
improvement suggests itself. We all know the rest of that 
story. We know that he will never achieve that perfect 
sand cake; but we know also that whatever makes life 
worth living, whatever lends it interest or satisfaction or 
nobility, will lie in the pursuit. 

The heart of the play purpose is always an ideal. It is 
the statue in the marble that commands conquest of the 
obdurate material that intervenes. What drives the child 
to teach his blocks their lesson and to make the sand obey 
him is the vision, dim though it be at first, of the growing 
temple. And it is the vision growing within him as the 
outer fabric gets shaped, advancing with every gain of skill, 
reflecting the achievement and reflected by it, that keeps 
him building. 



260 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The ideal is less obviously present where the end is not 
a material product; but it is always there and dominant. 
It governs the fighting instinct, prescribing to the boy new 
forms of contest and more difficult opponents as fast as 
victories are won ; its voice is always for a further conquest, 
and will not cease in him until, like Galahad, he wins the 
Holy Grail — the, humanly speaking, unattainable. A 
high school boy is not heard to say : " I can now throw, 
kick, hit the line, well enough," or "The team is successful 
enough now." So a phantom quarry keeps ever just ahead 
of him in all the chasing games. If a little girl's plant grows 
well, she feels that she must make it do better still, that it 
must have more blossoms and more beautiful ones. She 
does not say of her baby brother, that now he is doing well 
enough and she need not attend on him so devotedly : there 
is no end, here or hereafter, to what her love would give. 
The child perhaps has discovered what is on the other side 
of the back fence; but there is another fence beyond; 
and there is one beyond the farthest star. There is no limit 
and no sense of approaching one, in the demand that the 
play spirit is making on every child in every play. 

The human spirit is like a magic lantern. The light of 
a great instinct shines through it from within and casts 
its picture on the mists ahead. As the child or the man 
perfects his nature in the likeness of that image, the image 
itself becomes brighter and more defined. But the copy 
he makes will never equal the original — not while the man 
is still alive. 

Play drills the child to the service of ideals under the 
conditions imposed by his social and physical surroundings. 
He is squeezed to the desired pattern between the inexorable 
pressure of the ideal within him and the obdurate resistance 
of outer fact. 



PLAY IS THE SERVICE OF IDEALS 261 

The ideal ends that play prescribes are the ideals that 
dominate our later life, the ends for which men and women 
in all ages have gladly died and been praised for doing so. 
Building, creation, rhythm ; nurture, curiosity ; hunting, 
fighting, citizenship, — these are the abiding sources of 
our ideals. The mother who sacrifices her life for her child, 
the poet facing poverty and death for the sake of art, the 
scientist for his discovery, the patriot for his country, testify 
to the moral sufficiency of the same instinctive motives 
that govern children's play. The fighting instinct itself, 
which to some people seems the least ennobling, is the basis 
of the great ideals of chivalry which alone have shown 
power to capture not merely the reason but the imagination 
of our western world. 

Play supplies what we call the professional element in 
any kind of work. Standing beside the practical, the useful, 
the utilitarian end, there appears this other glorified presenta- 
tion of the same object in its eternal relations as a thing 
of beauty, as something worth serving for itself. Beside 
the useful tool, there stands the ideal efficiency; beside the 
shelter from the cold and rain, the temple not made with 
hands ; beside the serviceable invention, the mystery still 
unsolved, challenging to new adventure of the mind ; beside 
the practical improvement in the public service, the Zion 
of our dreams. 

The ideal that is at the heart of each play instinct has 
in its time — that is, through a great part of human history 
— been worshiped as a god : the fighting instinct as Mars, 
or Thor, or Hercules ; the hunting instinct as Diana ; rhythm 
as Apollo with his attendant muses; nurture as Ceres, as 
the Madonna; curiosity as Minerva or Pallas Athene; 
the making instinct as Hephaistus, with the demigods 
Daedalus and our English Wayland Smith; while all the 



262 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

ruling gods — Wodin, Zeus, the great Jehovah himself — 
have been national or tribal deities, embodying the instinct 
of membership. The Christian church has been identified 
with the body of Christ in which all communicants are 
members and with the Holy Ghost, of which all may par- 
take. The Messiah is a political conception. 

Closing the vista there seems to be a unifying vision, 
an ideal of ideals. Not articulately spoken, but somehow 
implied in the voice of each fairy as she brings her gift, 
we seem to hear the words, "And there is a greater, more 
beautiful than I." Certainly there is a desire for unity of 
purpose, integrity of life, for a single and inclusive aim. And 
there seems to be some faculty for attaining this desire. 
We do somehow judge in each special case between the 
several instincts. We have some sort of criticizing prin- 
ciple, a "Reason" as Kant calls it, that asserts an ultimate 
authority. The word is very indistinct as to specific action — 
as indeed is the case with all ideals — exacting obedience to 
each syllable vouchsafed as a condition of its further utter- 
ance. But the instinct none the less exists, and is clothed 
with an authority which we directly recognize. 

So through the drill of play the child becomes a creature 
not only of purpose but of those ideal purposes that have 
always governed, and must govern, human life. The whole 
of these ideals, emanating centers of the great instincts 
of which man is the outcrop, we shall never know. Our 
nature, as Emerson said, is open on one side to what seems 
an infinite mind or oversoul — incalculable, extra-personal 
— an unsounded reservoir of thought and purpose that 
transcends any realized idea. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

PLAY AND DRUDGERY 

A REASON often given for assigning to play a very subor- 
dinate place in moral training is that it excludes drudgery, 
and so affords no preparation for meeting an essential — 
some people seem to consider it the essential — problem of 
the moral life. 

There is on the face of it much plausibility in this con- 
tention. The way to learn to do a thing is usually by doing 
it, and it would seem that play , which is the very antithesis 
of drudgery, can afford no important discipline for its per- 
formance. And yet I believe the argument to be fallacious. 
I believe not only that play is essential in any system of 
moral training, but that, in especial, it is an important prep- 
aration for meeting this specific evil so dreaded by the 
modern man. 

To understand how this can be, or whether it can be, the 
case, we must consider a little what drudgery is and how it 
comes about. 

Drudgery, in the first place, is not identical with work 
nor a necessary incident of it. The best work, as has been 
said in an earlier chapter, satisfies the play instincts; is 
done, that is to say, for its own sake and not for an ulterior 
object. Such work includes that of the artist, the scientist, 
the mother, the lover of his kind, the patriot — the best 
definition of work, in the last analysis, being occupation 
that satisfies our team sense as members of a social whole. 

Work however often includes drudgery. It is not always 

263 



264 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

adequately inspired. There are things that have to be done 
in this world which do not carry their own motive with them, 
are not irradiated by the end they serve. 

The end itself, in the first place, may not be of the illumi- 
nating sort. It is in the service of the hungers that drudgery 
is most commonly undergone, chiefly as a necessary incident 
of self-support; and the hungers, as we have seen, lend no 
immediate inspiration to the labor they exact. They are 
among the "ulterior" motives of the usual definition of 
what is not play — our taskmasters and not our gods; 
slave drivers, whose commands are enforced by penalties, 
not wholly by their own direct authority. 

And the hunger motive is not only in itself without the 
power of conferring immediate satisfaction, but it often takes 
us where no self-justifying motive is encountered by the 
way. A man may have to make his living by methods afford- 
ing little scope to any of the great constituting instincts 
outside of whose service action is barren of immediate 
spiritual return. The means of obtaining physical support 
may be as uninspiring as the end. 

Such is the very essence of drudgery — occupation di- 
vorced from immediately satisfying motive. And subjec- 
tion to such occupation is peculiarly the fate of man, espe- 
cially under civilized conditions. The evil is one that he 
has brought upon himself through his ingenuity in devising 
means for the accomplishment of his desires. It is his 
thousand cunning inventions of new ways of obtaining food 
and shelter, and satisfying his other fast-multiplying wants, 
that have superseded in his case the original means of satis- 
faction and led him from the path that nature intended him 
to follow, and along which his achieving instincts still impel. 

Man has invented drudgery, and thereby subjected him- 
self to an evil from which all other creatures are exempt. 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 266 

The animal seeks his sustenance by the method which na- 
ture originally prescribed and which is still written in his 
active instincts. Even the savage hunts and fights and 
fashions weapons in a way that accurately satisfies his 
native impulses. In his aboriginal condition man the 
hunter and fighter may be called upon to hunt and fight 
to the point of sickness and exhaustion, but he is not com- 
pelled to leave his natural way of life and go forth into a 
wilderness of uncongenial occupation — to adding eternal 
columns of figures, working a treadmill, or digging under 
ground. Under nature's scheme the method of obtaining 
a living, though far less effective than the ways that civilized 
man has invented for himself, had the advantage that it 
was also the living of a life : the hungers and the active in- 
stincts pulled all one way. 

For civilized man, on the contrary, all that has changed. 
The herdsman supplants the hunter at an early stage ; Cain 
the farmer kills Abel the herdsman ; Arkwright and Steven- 
son and McCormick have lessened the progeny of Cain; 
and at each remove man finds himself separated by a wider 
gulf from the life that nature intended him to lead. 

And given the new, more effective though less satisfying 
way of supplying material needs, an iron necessity in the 
form of laws of population and of competition forces its 
adoption. The alternative is to embrace the new method 
or die. Not hunting beyond the point of fatigue, but work- 
ing in a mill or office, at tasks that are tiresome even while 
the man is strong and fresh, has become the condition of ob- 
taining physical subsistence. Man's instincts still point 
where nature aimed them during the hundreds of centuries in 
which they were evolved, but civilization has side-stepped, 
requiring of him tasks to which he is not fitted, and leaving 
many of his native instincts unfulfilled. 



266 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Thus under the conditions that man has fashioned for 
himself there is a fault in the strata, a break in the direction 
of his life, as a result of which he is compelled to exist largely 
outside of those instincts with which he was originally fitted 
out and of which his spiritual patrimony still consists. 
Nimrod is set to hunting title deeds. The descendant of 
the Vikings must content himself with copying bills of sale. 
Instead of charging the enemy, the soldier soul must charge 
up items in a book account. Making a living has become 
incompatible with life itself according to his native power 
to live. Pain and hunger, hard taskmasters to all living 
things, are in this respect more cruel to man than to any 
other creature, driving him, through the stimulation' of his 
own abundant ingenuity, to follow more and more a path 
in which he is homesick from the start. 

What we have to call crime, idleness, and vagabondage 
is largely the continuance of unreconstructed man in the 
direction in which nature aimed him, past the switch in- 
tended to shunt him off into our civilized pursuits. Drud- 
gery, on the other hand, is the penalty paid by those who 
take the curve for civilization and way stations and leave 
the ancient track. And it is usually only the way stations 
they can reach. 

It is true that all real work is supported, as I have said, 
by the great team instinct. But though the instinct is 
always there, it is not always strong enough to float the 
service it requires of us. Our duty to society prescribes 
actions to which it does not always sufficiently impel. We 
want to support our family, to do our part as citizens, but 
we do not always want to add up the accounts, copy the 
manuscript, make the calls, or perform the daily task which 
our desire implies. Even dying for one's country, though 
satisfying at the moment of vision, cannot always be so 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 267 

exhilarating as it sounds, during the perhaps tedious process 
of putting the idea into execution. 

Even the other play instincts besides loyalty have their 
hard prescriptions. There is an artistic as well as a social 
conscience, and it is as hard a taskmaster as the other. 
The great word of the Renaissance, the great forgotten 
word that reconciles morality and art, was virtu, the man- 
hood of the artist — signifying his readiness to go through fire 
and water and miser}^ and starvation in obedience to his vis- 
ion, as embodied in some triumphant example of the beautiful. 

The best play involves sacrifice in preparation, sometimes 
in the form of drudgery. Music is an mstinctive satisfaction, 
but the practice on the piano prerequisite to the most rudi- 
mentary expression is not an unfailing joy even to ourselves. 
So we love literature, but not necessarily the Latin grammar, 
which is an important path to literary appreciation. So 
also the instinct of curiosity prescribes, thanks to man's in- 
vention of aids to his intellectual life, the learning of the 
alphabet, of the multiplication table, and of many other 
discovered means of acquiring, assimilating, and transmitting 
knowledge. Play of the fullest and most satisfying sort im- 
plies a period of apprenticeship not wholly illuminated by 
the instinct which it serves. 

In thus providing new and better means of satisfying the 
play instincts, especially of creation, rhythm, and curiosity, 
civilization has again departed from nature's path, but this 
time in a way wholly beneficent. The savage (if we could 
get back to the time when he really was a savage and not a 
highly conventionalized and cultivated being) learned to 
sing and dance and speak only so far as the immediate joy 
of each act and the illumination of his own short purposes 
would carry him. Civilization has taught us how to go 
much farther if only we will endure the pain of learning. 



268 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

It is upon the importance of preparing for these new 
ways of man's discovery — of learning the new methods 
of making a Hving, of serving the state and his fellow men, 
and of satisfying the play instincts through art and science 

— that the great nose-to-the-grindstone school of education 
plants itself. That school, it is true, seems to cherish the 
mere discomfort of the learning process regardless of whether 
the point of actual fruition is ever reached, and to value its 
moral training in proportion as the pupil's own will remains 
unexercised. But yet it stands for the important truth that 
these new ways must be acquired whether the process of 
acquisition is or is not agreeable. 

Just how far schooling is, or should be, drudgery and how 
far it ought to be a fulfillment of the play instincts, it is not 
necessary here to consider — especially as the frontier will 
vary every hour and with every individual. It should be 
noted in this connection that the mere requiring of a study 
by established custom, and the fact that he finds the older 
children already proficient in it and scornful of his ignorance, 
is in itself enough to recommend it to the child. Children 
easily accept the judgment of their elders, and especially 
of older children, as to what is real in life, as witness the 
attitude of English schoolboys toward writing Latin verse 

— which, though they may not like, they seem to accept 
as a fixed part of human destiny. In the case of reading 
and writing children soon get an inkling, through observ- 
ing their elders, of the place of these accomplishments in 
the real life around them, and long to be admitted to the 
mystery. 

Still it is clear enough that, as stated in an earlier chapter, 
there must be a certain amount of drudgery in school : some 
things must be taught which the play instincts do not always 
cover. A person turned loose in the modern world without 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 269 

ability to read, write, or cipher would have a good case against 
those responsible for his education, regardless of how as a 
child he felt toward the acquisition of those accomplishments. 
Ability to unlock the door to the whole world of knowledge 
is worth spending a good while in learning the combination. 

And school should always be carried on with the firm 
assumption that certain things have to be learned whether 
the learning of them is agreeable or otherwise. There is 
a lesson taught by such authoritative attitude even more 
valuable than the three R's. It is of all things necessary 
that the child shall learn that the grown-up world is real, 
and has the right, even the necessity, of seeing that its laws 
and conventions are observed. Whoever is to remain at 
large in civilized society must learn sooner or later to conform 
to its requirements. The lesson is as important as the 
knowledge that water is wet, fire hot, and heavy weights 
bad for dropping on one's toes. It is a question of orienta- 
tion, of learning what is what and what isn't in real life. 
The school presents society to the child. It stands as, 
next the home, the main social fact of his surroundings ; and 
it is bound by every consideration of honesty and humanity 
to present it to him as it is. 

A final motive prescribing drudgery — besides the hun- 
gers, the need of apprenticeship, and the satisfaction of the 
social, the artistic, and the scientific conscience — is asceti- 
cism, the shadow of the conscientious motives, the canoniza- 
tion of their negative side, which embraces the penalty of 
virtue as if it were the essence of it. Asceticism is the 
apotheosis of the Big Injun, the self-imposed suffering of 
its saints being a perverted but heroic form of stunt. 

Drudgery then there must be if we are to support our 
physical life, to fulfill the great instinct of loyalty, or to 



270 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

attain the highest satisfaction of the other play instincts. 
Fully to serve any of these ends we must do work that is 
dry and joyless in the doing of it. The antagonist cannot 
be ignored. How can he be overcome? 

I believe the first thing to be recognized is that mere experi- 
ence of drudgery is often ineffective, and that when it does 
serve a purpose it is as apt to be an evil as a good. 

In the first place the mere repeated doing of a thing does 
not necessarily produce the habit of doing it, or any other 
moral effect. Or perhaps I should say that going through 
the motions does not necessarily mean doing the thing. 
The doing, to leave a moral residuum, must proceed from 
the person's own will, not from an external cause ; for a 
faculty that has not really been exercised has certainly not 
been trained. The soldier on leave and the sailor on shore 
have been cited by Gulick as examples of the impotence of 
an enforced routine to produce a habit, — the degree of 
regularity observed in these being a good measure of the 
effects of this method of education. The boarding school 
boy often exliibits similar results. 

It is of course true that men may become so accustomed 
to routine — if the work is not too disagreeable or the hours 
too long — that it ceases to be drudgery to them. Prob- 
ably even soldiers and sailors attain this negative adapta- 
tion. Men may through the hypnotic power of repetition 
become addicted to it, as to any other drug, until it is far 
easier for them to keep on in the beaten road than to turn 
aside from it. But such insensibility is not a moral power 
but merely a nervous adaptation ; and it is an adaptation 
only to the particular routine experienced, not to drudgery 
as such. The bank clerk is not prepared for the tedium of 
the sailor's life nor the sailor for the routine of the bank clerk. 
Adaptation to a certain round of duties does not make 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 271 

the man who has acquired it any more able to encounter 
drudgery in general ; it has only made a certain sort of repeti- 
tion cease to be drudgery for him. It is like the hardening 
of the sailor's hand, convenient for his especial sort of work, 
but not generally applicable to the rubs of life. 

Becoming addicted to a fixed program is indeed rather a 
handicap to success in any other line. Endurance of drudge 
ery, triumphantly acquired, brings on a sort of progressive 
numbness, with increasing inability to change. If we could 
so train a child to a given routine that he would not mind 
it, we should have so far diseducated him for those occupa- 
tions requiring a different sort of tedium as well as for all 
pursuits calling for initiative and enterprise. Hence the 
lamentation of Max O'Rell that French children have been 
taught their lessons so thoroughly that they keep on saying 
them all the rest of their lives, in contrast to the effects 
of the less fornial English education. 

The truth is that there is no such thing as being inured 
to drudgery as such, or to pain in any form. The whole 
thing is a myth. As Emerson says : Heroism will never 
be made easy. Nobody ever got used to being hurt, or 
learned to like it. Certain things may cease by practice to 
be drudgery to certain people ; but neither drudgery which 
continues to be such nor any other pain becomes less obnox- 
ious through familiarity. On the contrary, the longer you 
have the toothache the less you desire its continuance ; the 
more hours the bore has talked to you the more bored you 
get. An hour a day of either one or the other experience 
would not make the visitation a jot more welcome. In 
short, becoming insensible to a given experience is as likely 
to be loss as gain, while general insensibility comes only 
with death, of which its partial triupiph represents an early 
stage. 



272 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Ability to bear drudgery or any other kind of pain is a 
power — a positive, not a negative, acquirement. It is 
won by active not passive experience, and is a quality not 
of the nervous system but of the moral nature. It is true, 
and is one of the most important truths of life, that people 
do learn to endure pain and to accept, along with other 
obstacles, the drudgery that their true purposes impose upon 
them. But the essential point is that the ability thus to 
bear and to accept is positive, not negative. It is not that 
pain or drudgery has become pleasanter, but that the power 
to bear, to persevere in spite of these, has been increased. 

There is, short of death, no anti-drudgery specific. Just 
as the great soldier is not made by any special insensibility 
to wounds or starvation, but by a greater courage to encoun- 
ter them; as a passive training in being shot or starved 
would leave him not stronger, but weaker to endure ; as it is 
the practice in actively braving danger and hardship, and 
the positive qualities thereby developed in him, that have 
been his making, — so the conqueror of drudgery is not the 
slave or drudge who has been most thoroughly subjected 
to it, but the man endowed with the strongest affirmative 
purpose to persist. 

A popular example of the power to endure rough usage is 
the football player. But if our young athletes were to begin 
early in September a course of being thumped over the head, 
kicked in the shins, squashed beneath heavy weights, and 
dropped off buildings at various heights onto the sidewalk, 
they would not become especially hardy or courageous. On 
the contrary, the various bumps and bruises thus acquired, 
and the purely receptive habit in regard to them, would 
make them less able to endure. What makes the football 
player is the kicking, not the being kicked. It is learning 
to keep his eye on the ball and his heart on getting it over 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 273 

the line, utterly regardless of bumps and kicks and other 
physical annoyances, that makes a player of him. It is 
what he has learned to do, not what he has become accus- 
tomed to suffer, that has developed him. In truth there is 
no other thing that can be learned, no other power that can 
be developed in a human being, than the power of doing 
something. All force and all power, whether moral or physi- 
cal, is active. The idea of a passive capacity is purely 
mythical. There is no such thing and never was. 

Doing drudgery is not a specific kind of action. It is 
action inducing a specific kind of pain. It cannot be learned 
any more than action-that-produces-headache can be learned. 
There are many ways of getting a headache, some of them 
of less moral value than some others ; but there is no specific 
training for them all. So there are a great variety of ways 
of acting outside of the instincts — of doing drudgery — 
but there is no one way of learning to do them, because their 
common element is not in an active principle but in a pas- 
sive effect. 

So although drudgery — or at least learning certain 
things regardless of whether they are drudgery or not — • 
has an important place in education, and although the atti- 
tude of the school should be that things must be done 
whether they are agreeable or otherwise, let us not fall into 
the error of supposing that it is the mere lack of illuminat- 
ing motive that is of value, or that it necessarily develops 
any power of encountering a similar absence later on. 

Morality is evermore active and not passive : moral effect 
depends not on what was suffered, but on what was done. 
It is only so far as the child cooperates that moral good 
can possibly result. Was the purpose his? If not, what 
avails it that he submitted to it ? Learned to do drudgery ? 



274 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Not so far as he did not do it — so far as it was your will, 
not his own, that governed. He can learn perseverance only 
by persevering ; there is no such experience in doing what 
you day by day and bit by bit exact of him. How happy 
is he born and taught that serveth not another's will. How 
is he so taught? By the daily habit of serving another's 
will or his own ? If you can call in as assistant in your gram- 
mar lesson the love of beautiful form and the desire to master 
it, and can teach him to face the long road ahead with the 
will to reach that far-off goal ; if you can make him feel the 
desire to make good, and submit himself to your guidance 
as a means of doing so ; if you can induce him to take the 
responsibility of getting himself to college, or put into him 
the desire even to please his father by buckling down to 
work — why then you have done something for his moral 
development because you have got him, the force that 
constitutes his moral nature, in motion, and growth must 
inevitably result. But except as you do so enlist the child 
himself, you have done nothing for him morally because he 
has done nothing for himself. 

The experience of doing drudgery will, like any other 
experience, produce moral development in proportion as 
it is active, and the development will be in those especial 
powers that were exercised and only there. There may, it 
is true, be this much of specific benefit in the performance 
of drudgery, that it sometimes results in discovering the 
weak point of this particular enemy of man, namely, that 
upon a fierce and determined attack he sometimes shrivels 
up and disappears — the stoutly carried task ceasing to be 
drudgery and the bold warrior winning through to his 
natural allies on the other side. Not the training of a 
power, but the acquiring by experience of a bit of strategic 
knowledge, is in such case the benefit obtained. 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 275 

But except for such incidental discovery of the fact that 
drudgery is not invincible, there is no specific power, no 
tactic applicable to the routing of this especial enemy as 
such. The preparation needed in this case, as in that of 
any other evil, is the habit not of suffering, but of doing 
something else in spite of it. It is the positive acquirement 
of some valorous method of turning the attention not upon 
the pain, but away from it, that holds the secret ; or it is 
the power of fusing it with something else that becomes 
too strong for it, that carries it away in a mighty current, 
melts it in the heat of a passionate pursuit; or finally, it 
is the strong purpose that enables the person to keep on in 
spite of it. These are the true antagonists of drudgery and 
constitute the only means by which it can be met. 

What then is the service of play in developing the powers 
that can overcome drudgery, or make us able to endure it? 

In the first place play is training in the glad service of those 
ideals which prescribe that drudgery must be endured and 
justify its endurance. The artist, scientist, soldier, mother, 
citizen, exemplars of the great play instincts — these are the 
typical heroes of our race; and not insensibility to pain 
but devotion to the ideals they serve has made them such. 
Especially is the play instinct of membership — source of 
the great power to belong, to act not as an individual but 
as the single-minded servant of a cause — the maker of 
heroic lives. 

Secondly, the habitual attitude of purpose, of subordina- 
tion to an inner image, that play insistently prescribes, 
in which it gives daily and hourly practice during all the 
plastic years, is the distinctively heroic attitude. The 
power to give yourself wholly to an end, to lose yourself 
in the work in halid, not to know whether you are building 



276 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the house or the house is building you, whether you are 
carrying the ball or are merely the one in the mud at the 
bottom of the heap so long as the baJl is pushed across the 
line; to fight on in the cause regardless of cost or conse- 
quence : this is the power of all others that conquers pain and 
makes drudgery accepted so long as it leads toward the goal. 

In the training of this power of purpose, play furnishes, 
as I have indicated, a steady and progressive course. Like 
all good teachers, it begins with an easy task and gradually, 
as power is acquired, sets more and more difficult ones. 
The child's first purposes are short and readily attained. 
Gradually larger and more inclusive ones are prescribed and 
he is drilled in longer and longer stretches of the will through 
further postponements of fruition. To kick, to walk, to 
run, to play tag, to play football, to train for the football 
team, to go through daily practice of uninteresting details 
— keeping to regular hours, denying himself indulgences 
of many sorts — to hold other boys up to this standard : 
such is one branch of the play curriculum. And it is the 
same with the other strands of growth, — a gesture, a 
dance, a drama, a ritual ; a sand cake, a block house, a 
temple not made of hands ; to pet the kitten, to tend a 
plant, to take care of the baby, to maintain an ideal relation 
in human love ; to be the wind, sail a boat, study meteor- 
ology, understand the cosmic moods ; ring-around-a-rosy, a 
game of sides, the college team, the city, the ideal common- 
wealth : these are the sort of graduated purposes through 
the presentation of which the play instincts train the moral 
power and teach the child to follow the voice of his true 
desire across widening spaces of what without it would be 
pain and drudgery. 

And these two attributes of play — purpose and the 
service of ideals — are in truth all one. Play is always 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 277 

purposeful in form, ideal in direction. Nature has made 
of her chosen method of education a continual preparation 
both for the sort of thing her child will have to do and for 
the one effective way of doing it. The moral set and atti- 
tude she teaches is that of the trained servant of ideals. 

And supposing even these motives fail. Supposing the 
master instincts fail, as they sometimes will, to guide and 
master us, — suppose that in spite of whatever training we 
have received, our best impulses run thin, inspiration dies, 
and both joy in the act and the illumination of its ideal end 
fail to float us over the pain and tedium of its accomplish- 
ment. There will, even in the most fortunate lives, be 
times when the only resource left is to hold on by what is 
called clear grit — the sheer bulldog quality of perseverance. 

But even here the experience of play is not irrelevant. 
A very large proportion of it, after the sixth year, has been 
under the tutelage of the fighting instinct — the Paladin 
of our nature, addressed to obstacles as such. And what 
the child's own courage does not hold him to his playmates 
have required of him. Children have no use for a squealer, 
and their standard of courage and perseverance is higher 
than is ever found in the schoolroom. Children try hard 
at spelling and arithmetic, but not as they try at baseball. 
The best effort of the classroom is soft and "sissy" as com- 
pared to that. Would any teacher expect a boy to write 
with a broken finger? He will catch swift pitching with 
one for eight innings and not think to mention it. And in 
after life the experience stands him in good stead. He can 
still buck up and play the game under the most dreary con- 
ditions and in the shadow of the blackest moods. Whatever 
there is in sheer bulldog perseverance, it would seem that 
play furnishes for the child the most severe and constant 
training of it. 



278 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

But purely conscientious action, the state of sheer holding 
on by bulldog grit, is not a state to be desired, nor to be 
endured longer than is necessary. It is better to be con- 
scientious than to be recreant, to hold on with mere obstinacy 
than to give in : truly an infinite distance, the distance 
between life and death, separates these two. But it is 
better still to triumph, to command the power that comes 
with present inspiration, if we can compass it. The con- 
scientious attitude is incomplete. It is the service of the 
absent god, turning toward the sun during its eclipse, the 
mere holding of the fort until the greater powers arrive. 
Conscience, indeed, is not fully conscientious unless it seeks 
to work through its present state to the better footing 
beyond. The old debate "whether it is better to be an 
angel of light or Crump, with his grunting resistance to the 
seven devils that beset him" may surely be closed, if indeed 
it was ever necessary. Inspiration must supersede con- 
science, the angel relieve the bulldog. Or rather it is the 
true aim of conscience to supersede itself and win back to the 
play spirit. We must try to act each time with a little more 
spirit, so that some day, in this world or the next, we may 
graduate from our meek resistance to oppression into the 
hilarious mood of the true sons of battle, and do our fighting 
in the grand manner of a Raleigh or a Farragut. 

We are not so to hug our own power of endurance that 
w^e make a cloak of it not only against evil but against our 
greater and more effective self. We must learn to call our 
gods to aid us and to welcome them. Every true prophet 
is a poet also, and where the vista closes sees the good 
transfigured as the beautiful. 

And perseverance, to have its full value, must be upon 
the actor's own responsibility. The grit of the common 
soldier is good, but the grit of the leader, of the artist, of 



PLAY AND DRUDGERY 279 

the self-directed in any line, is of a higher sort. For the 
leader, the originator, must have courage not merely to 
walk on in the line that has been set for him, but to walk 
where there is no line. He must not merely endure, but he 
must endure with an open and undefended heart. To 
him it is not given to say that he has his duty to guide him 
and that is enough. The throe of uncertainty, of first- 
hand, unguided decision must be his. He can wrap no 
cloak about him, put on no armor against gods or men, but 
must so conquer despair as to drive it not only from his 
acts but from his heart — that the god may again enter 
and take command ; foT save as the god returns to him he 
has no mandate to fulfill. 

Schooling in this higher perseverance must be through 
service to one's own ideals The bulldog must be his master's 
servant, not another's ; faithfulness to inspiration is not 
learned by serving other motives. What is done to please 
the schoolmaster, or from fear of him, teaches fear of school- 
masters and desire for their approbation, and is so far good 
— or evil ; but it can train to no higher allegiance. An act 
will rise no higher than its source, nor will habit reach back 
deeper than the act from which it grew. If his soul was in 
it, it made a path for his soul through which it may issue 
in his future acts. If his soul was not there, the path may 
be to that extent choked up and hearty action made less 
likely ever after. 

These things can play do toward the overcoming of 
drudgery, not because it has any specific, or because there 
is any specific, against drudgery or any other form of pain, 
but because play is life and the entrance of more life, and 
because life is the positive power in this world and the 
conqueror of all forms of pain and negation whatsoever. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

EXUBERANT PLAY 

The play of childhood is purposeful : it is so in its charac- 
teristic manifestations and in by far its greater part, but it 
is not always so. There is another kind of play of which 
I have not yet spoken and which is of especial interest in 
the present connection as affording a contrast with purpose- 
ful play and qualifying its supremacy. If you will observe 
a group of children at recess, hear them yell (as you may do 
from an^ivhere within a radius of half a mile), see them 
throw up their arms and jump as though they were trying 
to fly, watch them chase, dodge, thump each other, and act 
generally Hke a swarm of flies or a drove of young colts; 
you will see that there is another sort of play besides the 
purposeful, — play of what may be called the exuberant or 
blowing-off-steam variety. Here the motive seems to be 
not toward an end but outward in all directions from a 
center. Indeed the very bodily attitude, with arms and 
legs and fingers outstretched in the likeness of a starfish, 
even the hair standing on end, seems to suggest the centrif- 
ugal action of the force at work. The phenomenon is 
more in the nature of an explosion than of a purposeful pur- 
suit. There is no focusing of the attention and no dominat- 
ing outside object ; the vital force, instead of being turned 
into the cylinder to work toward some desired end, shrieks 
out through the safety valve, with no apparent object other 
than to escape. Action is squeezed out by excess of pressure 
from within rather than drawn forth by an outside aim. 

280 



EXUBERANT PLAY 281 

Play at recess or immediately after school is indeed a 
case not so much of action as of reaction. It is the straight- 
ening up of the young tree that has been bent rather than 
the putting forth of new growth. But exuberant play 
occurs independently of long confinement at a desk. All 
healthy children have at times a tendency to romp. A 
baby crows and kicks up his legs without the purpose of 
accomplishing any very definite feat. Children push each 
other ajid tumble about like young puppies, roll down a 
bank, repeat some favorite rhyme or gesture, climb over 
their uncle's shoulder from the back of his chair, or rush 
about the room in a, sort of mad ecstasy, banging against 
the walls and furniture and dropping on the floor after the 
manner of an insane dorbug; or they will whirl until they 
are dizzy and fall down, and perform a hundred other pranks, 
laughing all the time as though they would laugh themselves 
to pieces — without much trace of purpose beyond that of 
working oflF their energies by the path of least resistance. 

Much of the bawling, pushing, punching, chasing, and 
scufl3ing of boys of the Big Injun age and early adolescence, 
including the humorous warfare that enlivens the way 
home from school, is of this same exuberant or explosive 
mood. Kipling speaks of a sort of whirling totter with both 
arms stretched out, which some of his elaborately disagree- 
able heroes called a "gloat," which seems to belong to the 
same class of phenomena. 

During the later adolescent age, again, this exuberant 
force, as I have already observed, follows the channel of 
the games that have previously been serious. Collegians 
play tag in this spirit, or play baseball after supper on 
June evenings during the examination period, getting out 
and thumping the ball with an astonishing abandon — 
long after it has become invisible to older eyes — making 



282 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

brilliant plays and extraordinary muffs, claiming every- 
thing, announcing and abiding by ludicrous decisions — 
boasting, laughing, guying or applauding their own and 
each other's plays with an instant and joyful appreciation 
of the inappropriate. Exuberant play is here a sort of 
back lesson or review, reviving the acquirements of an 
earlier period and playing with them in an affectionate 
familiarity which shows that their original lesson has been 
learned. It is only such review that, as I have said, grown 
people recognize as "play." 

This exuberant play, though not the most important kind, 
has nevertheless an essential place in the child's develop- 
ment. Fun and exhilaration are in the first place worth 
while for themselves. It is good now and then to indulge 
this extravagant mood in which all the physical forces are 
let loose and body and soul romp together under the easy- 
going jurisdiction of the lords of whim. We should not 
always take our pleasures seriously, but remember to be 
foolish on occasion as the spirit moves. 

Physically also this sort of play must be even better for 
the child, or the grown person either, than the usual more 
serious kind. Combining as it does the, greatest bodily 
exertion with perfect relaxation of the mind, it gives the 
maximum of exercise with the minimum of fatigue. And 
then it exercises certain parts that otherwise would be 
imperfectly developed, establishes control of the voice 
in its more portentous aspects, and develops the grinning 
muscles of the face. It must be a great preventive of the 
long or sour visage : the lack of it is seen in Puritan physiog- 
nomy. It must also have visceral effects different from 
those of serious play ; and it calls upon the circulation, sends 
the blood singing through the veins, in a peculiar manner. 



EXUBERANT PLAY 283 

But exuberant play is even more important in its spirit- 
ual effects. An essential service of play is as an expression 
of individuality. The instincts that govern purposeful 
play represent the child universal ; they are the elements 
common to all human life. But there is a peculiar blend of 
these elements — the race soul speaking with a special voice 
and resonance — in every individual. An essential part of 
what play does for us is the finding of this voice. True 
play proceeds outwards from the depths ; it not only reaches 
the appointed end but it starts from the beginning ; all there 
is in the child's being, from the spinal marrow to the very 
roots of his hair, becomes engaged. It sounds the very 
accent of his daimon, lets out the last link of personality. 
A child's play should be to the individual spirit what the 
uninhibited sneeze is to the vocal chords. I saw the other 
day some remnants of the Iroquois tribe doing a war dance. 
Evidently a psychological value of the experience consisted 
in somehow shrieking or agonizing out as near as might be 
the very ultimate ego of the man. Each was trying to 
body forth in one lucky spasm the crude material of his 
personality. It is this same service that it is the special 
business of the shouting, leaping, exuberant play of child- 
hood to perform, — to fetch the voice from the deepest 
spot, to make sure that it shall be at least this once the very 
child himself who acts, to produce some noise or gesture 
that shall carry the raw essence of him. 

There is much virtue in this abandonment, occasionally 
throwing down the reins and letting uninhibited impulse 
take its course. The orgy was a recognized feature of 
most early rehgions; and it still has its merits, although 
usually more than canceled by its defects. Some people 
are chokebored and need the release of drink, or the stimulus 
of great excitement, to bring out their true expression. 



284 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Children's exuberant play has the advantages of the orgy 
without its drawbacks ; it does not as a rule become hyster- 
ical, and need never do so. With a little watching, it secures 
the benefits without the evils of the frolic mood. 

It is for all these reasons important that time and oppor- 
tunity be allowed for this sort of play. Even the shouting 
and rough talk and braggadocio of street boys are important 
expressions of the same need, and should not on all occasions 
be suppressed. There is more individuality in the voice 
than' in the words spoken ; but some of us never find our 
voice, never speak out, clear and bold, our native thought. 

Exuberant play has the sort of whirling-dervish effect, 
both of twisting the personality loose from clogs and in- 
hibitions — from entangling snares of fear and custom 
blurring its outline — and of winding in upon it, like a spool 
or cocoon, what really is its own. It stimulates the inner 
pole, the home end, of the give-and-take relation of which 
life consists. It is Sigurd the Walsung with his Norse 
assertion of wild, whirling, individuality. 

It is especially through exuberant play that individual 
mind and temperament impress themselves upon the body 
and nervous system ; so that not only the reflexes and 
habits of action but the muscles themselves, even the very 
bones, express character. The man's personality is to be 
read not only in the muscles of the eye and face, but in those 
of his arms and legs, in the deft hand, "the smoothly ghding 
knee," in the handwriting, the way he carries his head, in 
every bend and stiffness of the spine. 

Our bodies are not made with interchangeable parts; 
but each man's tools — his arms and legs and nerves and 
mental habits — are fashioned to the will that is to use 
them. Our subordinates are trained under our own eye, 
fitted to us, as I have said, like hand and glove and by the 



EXUBERANT PLAY 285 

same process — brought up responsive to our voice, per- 
meated by our individuality, and at last a part of it. It is 
only where we ourselves have changed, or where we are of 
a divided nature, that our faculties hesitate or fail to sup- 
port our policies. If we could be a unit ourselves, we should 
find our hand and heart, our whole body and every nerve 
center, crying out for what we ourselves desire. 

A recognized symptom of neurasthenia, present to a 
greater or less degree in all of us, and a prime source of 
failure and ineffectiveness, is that of divided personality. 
A mind and body built and instructed from the first by 
thoroughgoing action proceeding from the very core of 
being and thrilling out to the circumference — a personality 
molded by authentic acts and only such — would exhibit 
no such rifts ; it would be integrated, strike in a solid mass, 
be all there, wholly present to our occasions. It is shallow, 
what we call half-hearted action, beginning halfway out — 
factitious motives, semi-enlistment — that produce the un- 
fused, unconsolidated self. Life should proceed from the 
heart as well as toward self-justifying ends. It is only 
what a man's soul flames up into that becomes a part of him. 

Life is the appropriation by the spirit of the body and 
material it needs — in all creatures essentially the same 
process as that by which the acorn builds the oak. No 
two acorns are alike, and no one of them can learn from 
the outside what its own law requires. Difference, however, 
is not the important thing but only an indication of it: 
the essential is not difference but originality. If all acorns 
and all souls were in fact alike, each would still have to work 
alone, out from its own law, in order that the product might 
be instinct with a single life — a tree or a man, not a lifeless 
assemblage of parts such as some clever mechanician might 
have made. That the oak may be sound and whole, have 



286 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

one bent and accent through all its infinite variety, it must 
grow wholly from the center, each leaf and twig vibrant to 
one idea. 

Such originality does not mean egotism — confinement 
to a smaller, less universal, self — but quite the opposite. 
It is at the farthest depth and verge of individuality that 
the greater voices are heard. Our representative men — 
Lincoln, Emerson, William James — are not those who are 
most like everybody else, but among those who are most 
diiTerent — hilariously and unashamedly so. It is not upon 
the surface but at the center that our common inheritance 
is found. The universal is not the uniform. 

The spirit of the race is an inexhaustible spirit requiring 
an infinite expression. Each individual has assigned to 
him one syllable of the total word, and it is by speaking 
in the voice given him that he shares in the life and authority 
of the whole. 

Finally, as has perhaps already become apparent, the two 
kinds of play, the purposeful and the exuberant, are not in 
truth so wholly separate as I have found it necessary for 
the sake of clearness to pretend. Both moods are almost 
always present. Exuberant play is not often purely object- 
less; at least it does not remain so very long. Soon some 
sort of purpose supervenes. One leap into the air suggests 
a higher one; one good yell arouses the ambition to give 
another even more satisfying. The fiend that man harries 
is love of the best even in. the matter of letting off 
steam. 

On the other hand, even the most purposeful play has in 
it the quality of exuberance. Just because the child or 
man does lose himself in it, just for the very reason that 
he serves another and a higher will — a will impersonal, 
that seems external to himself — such play contains the 



EXUBERANT PLAY 287 

highest possibilities of self-fulfillment. It is in such humble 
service of a purpose that we find the highest, the completest, 
and even in the end the most exuberant, expression of 
personality. 

Rhythmic play, especially dancing, best illustrates the 
relation of these apparently opposing moods, because in 
rhythmic play the two are present both at once and almost 
equally. Dancing is at first a spontaneous ebullition, and 
the same is almost equally true of music. Every one who 
has heard a lark sing knows why the lyric poets of the old 
world have had to sing about them : he is the most satisfy- 
ing example in all nature of the spontaneous outpouring of 
the spirit. But both song and dancing very soon come 
under the dominion of an end, become partly purposeful 
instead of purely exuberant — or rather they seek a definite 
form for the sake of fuller expression of emotion. Purpose 
is born as the servant of their very overflowing. Rhythm 
makes of time a medium as definite as space ; and an ideal 
may be expressed as concretely in the one as in the other. 
The laws of rhythm are as precise as those of form ; music 
may be as accurate as sculpture. 

On the other hand there still lives underneath the perfect 
form the burning exuberant desire. The madness of the 
great god Bacchus, quivering for an infinite expression, 
thrills in each restrained outline, and governs its restraint. 
A wild dervish soul slumbers in the demurest minuet, as 
the maddest cancan holds the germ of severe and stately 
form. Dancing was placed by the Greeks at the apex of 
their educatiorial system as including both music and gym- 
nastics, the two principles on which that system was built 
up. Similarly it combines the two great play motives, the 
motive of bringing forth an authentic expression of the soul 
and the motive of making that expression concrete. Every 



288 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

dance is Bacchanalian at heart, and, as the Muses testify, 
every art is in its germ a form of dancing. 

Not merely dancing and music, but all play as I have said 
really combines these two characteristic moods. True ex- 
pression of human personality must both come from the 
depths and proceed outward toward the ideal which a true 
interpretation of the depths implies. To bring out all 
there is of character, the full resonance of personality, 
the string we play on must be fastened at both ends — in 
authentic impulse and concrete achievement. The differ- 
ence between exuberant and purposeful play is one of accent ; 
there is no real line between. It is the function of the one 
to make certain of the inner connection, to link up action 
indubitably with the roots of personality, that of the other 
to extend the frontier forward into its prophesied and in- 
finitely elaborated forms. 



CHAPTER XXXIV 

RELATEDNESS OF PLAY 
In proportion to our relatedness we are strong. — Emerson. 

I HAVE described the child of the Big Injun age as if he 
were intellectually omnivorous. Such, however, is not 
quite my meaning, nor the true state of the case. Not 
everything in heaven and earth is, even to the Big Injun, 
equally desirable to do or to exploit. His very search for 
real experiences implies selection ; if one thing were truly 
as welcome to him as another, there would be no need of 
searching. He starts out with a want, although a very 
general one; the key he carries is a master key, fitting a 
great variety of locks, but it will not fit everything. 

A child's collection of treasures, for instance, gives at first 
sight little evidence of selection. His taste seems superbly 
catholic. Beyond the predominance of shiny objects — 
glass, metal, crystal, mica, polished stone, betraying a pre- 
dilection common to every hoarding creature, whether man, 
monkey, or magpie — these precious miscellanies of forgotten 
objects, suggestive of a junk shop or a domestic day of judg- 
ment, seem to disclaim the presence of any bias in their 
assembling. There has been, nevertheless, in the making 
of them, a selective principle at work. The child's signature 
is there if you can read it. He has been searching not for 
things in general, but for his own, and these are a part of his 
inheritance. 

The very tendency to hoard, to bring things home and 
make treasures of them, is significant of the real relation. 
u 289 



290 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Why does he so want these particular objects that he cannot 
be parted from them? It is not a matter of touching and 
leaving ; he wants to hug them to him, to get as near them 
as he can. He will not be separated from his favorite 
acquisition even at night, if he can help it, but insists on 
taking the new knife, squirrel, kitten, to bed with him. 
He keeps his pet turtle in his mouth while visiting his mother's 
friends, puts the young field mice he has acquired inside his 
shirt, and likes to feel them run down his sleeves and around 
behind his back, wondering what his aunts and elder sisters 
can find to shriek about. 

Here comes in the vast significance of pockets. Not to 
touch lightly the varied topics of his interest, not to flit 
from flower to flower and forget one impression in another 
— not such is the scientific method of the Big Injun. No 
dilettante he. His idea is to bring things home, swallow, 
assimilate them. Much of what he finds he does 
swallow, to the increase of his experience in unexpected 
ways, and the pecuniary advantage of the family physician. 
Next best to swallowing is to have these other, quasi-bodily, 
receptacles by means of which he can physically incorporate 
his treasure with himself. The child's passion for hard 
contact with the world is not alone to print his personality 
upon outer fact, but partly for the sake of so knocking the 
outer fact into himself that it may be his forever after. 
Truly the first pocket — home of the most important scien- 
tific collection, whether of tools or specimens, that he will 
ever make — does actually possess that seeming extravagant 
importance that the child attaches to it. 

The child feels as he does towards his treasures because 
they are in truth part of himself. They are his conquests, 
outposts of the mind, by means of which he will divine, 
classify, and assimilate still further territory. He has 



RELATEDNESS OF PLAY 291 

property in these, as he has property in tools, because in the 
continued possession of these the persistence and extension 
of his life is now involved. In searching for treasure he 
has really been searching for himself. Beneath all his hard 
realism the Big Injun is a good deal of a mystic ; the heart 
and passion of his search has been the unconscious convic- 
tion : "that art thou." 

Every child should have a box, a drawer, or a closet of 
his own in which to keep his treasures, and a piece of wall 
to pin his pictures on. i.\fter the pocket, this is the next 
circle of the widening personality. And in his treasure 
house there should be room to classify. Order is the con- 
dition of true possession. He wants to control, not only 
in the physical but in the mental sense; to understand his 
world, not merely rub against it. There is in every child 
a passion for order, for handles to swing things by, for 
coherence in them that they may be swung; for getting 
them sorted, each kind in a box to itself where it can be 
dealt with all at once. Mental dominion, unity through 
order, is his great desire. You have not observed that he 
was orderly? Perhaps not; but there are different kinds 
of order, and different subjects. You and the chambermaid 
may not agree about your papers, any more than you and 
your daughter about her caterpillars. Science and house- 
keeping often misunderstand each other. 

Next to the treasure box comes the room or lair. There 
are, it is true, instincts at work here other than that of 
organizing one's world. All children make houses of chairs ; 
most, when given a chance, make huts whether in the woods 
or from old boxes and pieces of tin on empty lots. The 
raiding games all recognize the homing instinct. The 
child's room is thus partly a home or place of refuge, and 



292 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

it is partly a fortress — witness our universal preference for 
having a rock, tree, or wall behind us. There is, further, in 
our race a catlike attachment to places we are used to ; 
the accustomed haunt becomes so much a part of us that 
we pine and wither when away from it : homesickness shows 
that we can be wounded in this relation as deeply as in our 
visible body. But the room — besides being a lair, a refuge, 
and a haunt — is also an extension beyond the treasure box 
of the assimilated world, another ring of the child's expand- 
ing sovereignty. Henceforth the line between what is 
and what is not himself will be at his room door. 

Very important is the adaptation of the child's widening 
physical domain to the selective principle within him. If he 
is so environed that his spiritual hunger can find the material 
it needs, without starvation and without surfeit, the problem 
has been solved. The law and possibilities of ownership 
should be prayerfully considered to this end by every parent. 
True property is an instrument of thought, vibrant, re- 
sponsive to the soul ; a predestined outgrowth of the inform- 
ing mind. As such it should be adequate, should fill in the 
invisible outline of personality at each successive stage. 
But beyond that it should not extend. The estate like the 
body should be lean, agile, well trained. Adipose pos- 
sessions are a burden and an incumbrance. Among grown 
people to-day it is only the comparatively poor who enjoy 
the benefits of wealth; the rich are drowned in it, like 
Clarence in the butt of malmsey. As Emerson was obliged 
to report, even half a century ago, " Things are in the saddle 
and ride mankind." It is the same even more generally 
with unfortunate children smothered in the annual ava- 
lanche of Christmas toys — their attention jerked from one 
exciting object to another until their tired nerves give way, 
and they wail out their despair over a world that presses 



RELATEDNESS OF PLAY 293 

too heavily upon them. If only it were all candy with its 
quick reaction and recovery ! Or if officious elders would 
permit the children to carry out their own instinctive remedy 
of smashing or immolation iri the nursery fire, that so their 
world might be reduced from a nightmare of plethora and 
confusion to a size that they can organize and use ! 

]\Iore important, of course, than the question of mere 
amount is that of right selection. It is bad to eat too much ; 
it is worse to eat that which is not food. My aim through- 
out this book is to show what is food to the spirit of the 
growing child, to indicate at least the main directions of his 
normal appetite and the changes that take place in it as he 
develops. Here I wish to insist upon the importance of a 
regard for this spiritual hunger, the importance to his life of 
having the needed objects and materials supplied. 

The relation is in truth a vital one. His strength is 
locked in these. In appropriate surroundings as much as 
in himself his future is contained. No creature is strong 
for all purposes; his power exists not toward all objects; 
it develops only in contact with the things to which Nature 
meant him to react. As Achilles at the sight of the sword, 
so power in every creature awakes in the presence of its 
destined counterpart, and only so. Wonderful is the power 
of the eagle and the leaping salmon : but without air or 
water where is their strength? So of man's cunning hand 
without tools or without material, of his cunning mind 
without its related world, of his affections without their 
natural objects. A fish without water is not a fish; a bird 
without air is not a bird. As air could be deduced from the 
bird's wing, water from the fish's tail, so could tools and 
multiform material be inferred from the human hand, and 
helpless infancy, companions, home and country be divined 
from a study of the human heart. And as fish and bird 



294 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

find their life in reaction to their environment, so the child 
exists or becomes alive only in the presence of those objects 
to which his powers have reference. The climber is born 
of the tree, the hunter of the quarry, the nurturer of the life 
he serves. 

And life inheres in the relation that gave it birth. The 
baby lives in companionship with its mother. That relation 
is the child — it is his life. So the bigger boy or girl lives 
through contact with his more varied world and in play with 
his companions. Except as objects appropriate to be acted 
on are present, the child is not there. He is a process, and 
takes place only as the two poles, the positive and negative, 
the soul and its materials, are brought together. He lives 
only in the presence of his opportunity. Man is a safety 
match : his power is not his, but lies in contact with the 
other half of him, his world and counterpart. 

Many people who have realized the importance of chil- 
dren's play think that it requires no special provision, for 
the very reason that it is so instinctive. They assume that 
the satisfaction of so universal an instinct is inevitable. But 
it is not inevitable. Eating is a universal instinct among 
healthy people, but there is such a thing as starvation. The 
impulse is inevitable, in the one case as in the other, but 
there may be nothing there to meet it, or what is there may 
be not food but poison. Play requires its appropriate ob- 
jects, — tools, medium, partner, playmates ; and these 
things are not self-providing. People sometimes speak as if 
the child were capable of evolving his own world out of 
nothing. He is perhaps a little better at doing so than 
grown-ups, but even he may find the task too hard for him, 
— as a man may have the musical instinct of a Beethoven 
and yet not be able to condense an orchestra out of thin air 
by the sheer force of his ability to use it if it were forthcoming. 



RELATEDNESS OF PLAY 295 

So, when you think of your own childhood, and remember 
that pLaying was as instinctive as breathing, and that, as it 
seems to you in retrospect, you always found plenty of 
chance to play without any special provision being made 
for that purpose, remember also that there was room to 
play and things and other children to play with, and con- 
sider whether there may not be children in our modern 
cities or on lonely country farms less fortunately placed. 
And sometimes even good conditions can be improved. 

Teachers are important to point out to the child the re- 
lations of the world to him — its confirmations of the presage 
of his mind — which the past generations have discovered. 
Their function, besides inculcating the mastery of tools, 
like the three R's, is to suggest categories, hypotheses, 
pigeon holes — help him to form apperceptive centers, as 
the slang is — through which he may organize his facts and 
expand his mastery of them ; skeleton regiments to receive 
and drill the new recruits. Teachers should show^ the child 
where the handles of things are, help him to see the picture 
in the mass of bewildering detail, construe the world a little 
for him, suggest the grammar of it for his further reading. 

But there is one thing greater than teaching as a prep- 
aration of the mind to recognize and assimilate its own, 
and that is imagination. Imagination is the great out- 
reaching power, the forward extension of the master instincts. 
It is their pioneer, the prospector who stakes out their 
claims. Imagination sharpens the spiritual appetite — 
makes the mind sticky to the facts belonging to it, as a magnet 
picks up iron filings — prepares hopeful preconception, and a 
hospitable attitude toward the expected guest. 



CHAPTER XXXV 

THE IMAGINATIVE PLAY OF THE BIG INJUN AGE 

Although the insistent desire to impersonate ceases with 
the coming of the Big Injun age — although indeed actual 
revolt against impersonation is characteristic of that age in 
its more intense manifestations — the impersonating tend- 
ency, or at least the general method of understanding things 
that it represents, does nevertheless survive as an essential 
element in the child's play and growth. 

In the first place the games of the Big Injun age, especially 
of the earlier part of it, include an element of make-believe. 
Puss in the corner, duck on a rock, old man in the castle, 
London Bridge, robbers and policemen, Indians and white 
men, hunt the squirrel, stealing eggs, I spy, run sheep 
run, prisoners' base — almost every game, whether of chas- 
ing, fighting, or throwing at a mark — has a name signify- 
ing that some little drama is being enacted, that there 
is more going on than appears on the outside. I have seen 
in a missionary magazine a picture of Chinese children play- 
ing "fox and geese," and their name for it was "kite and 
sparrows." In many cases, it is true, the names are handed 
down from times when the games were played by grown 
people. Newell in his " Games and Songs of American 
Children" shows us that Old Witch and similar games re- 
flected a very real superstition, and even that the tug of war 
feature in London Bridge represents the struggle of angels 
and devils for a human soul. But the survival of these 
names means something, and moreover, where there is no 

296 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 297 

tradition, the children themselves usually give a name sug- 
gesting an imaginative meaning. I remember some boys 
who, having invented a modification of " hunt the squirrel " in 
which the aim of the pursuer was to whack his fleeing foe 
with a bag containing a basket ball, promptly christened it 
Jack tlie Slugger. Some children I knew used to play with 
daisies and various weeds and grasses, each trying to knock 
the heads off the other's bunch by striking it with his own. 
They called a certain kind of grass "swords," while a rank 
yellow- topped weed was named "dukes," on whom the 
more democratic species were always taking signal vengeance 
for their pride and ostentation. In fact I think we all 
know that this sort of naming is the rule. 

Just how much the dramatic element suggested by such 
names actually amounts to is not easy to determine. It is 
certainly no longer the principal object of the game, nor 
even its secondary object, but has become subordinated, not 
only to the dominating, competitive instinct, but to the 
hunting or throwing or other accessory impulses that the 
game fulfills. But how much does it mean? How much 
does a fox or a red lion chasing you differ from a mere "it" 
similarly engaged? How different is a squirrel or a sheep 
from any other sort of quarry, or a duck from an ordinary 
piece of stone? In "Hi spy" the red lion has usually 
been forgotten altogether, and to the crowd I played with it 
never occurred even that "hi" meant I. In " hill dill " also 
the invitation to "come over the hill" has usually become 
elided — personally I never knew there was any hill to come 
over. 

And yet I think these names do stand for something, 
especially at first. It is a little more exciting to be a white 
man pursued by an Indian than merely to be Jimmie chased 
by Mary Ann; and a "policeman" strikes more terror to 



298 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the heart of the fleeing "robber" than a less official pursuer 
would do. There is indeed a mystic quality in the very 
notion of a game — a sense of something unseen at stake. 
I believe that even baseball and football — even golf, tennis, 
whist, and other games that make no formal claim to a hidden 
meaning — have something of this quality. We uncon- 
sciously dramatize them, and feel the presence of a more 
momentous issue than their outward form would quite 
account for. I am sure that such is the case during the Big 
Injun age. 

But the impersonating element in play survives the 
dramatic age not merely as an ingredient in games of con- 
test. Its most recognizable offspring is in dramatics proper, 
that form of impersonation in which the aim is no longer to 
realize an ideal to yourself but to make it visible to others. 
Dramatics have been a leading element in the play of primi- 
tive peoples, and should have a large place in the life of 
children of the Big Injun age, both in the home and on the 
playground. There is no other way in which they can so 
enter into the spirit of a story and share it with each other 
as by activig it. Dramatics offer a very practicable road 
into the heart of literature. 

Children's dramatics ought at first to be of the most in- 
formal character. The form should never go beyond the 
spirit; excellence of method should wait upon the need of 
accurate expression. The wear and tear of producing a 
dramatic performance in which children have been "well 
drilled" is almost more than human nerves can stand; 
while on the other hand the little productions they "will get 
up by themselves, with the aid of slight outside suggestion, 
and showing only such execution as their own standard 
demands, place little strain on any one and are worth ten 
times as much when all is done. 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 299 

A child's dramatic development should be continuous. 
There should never be a time, from the day he first acts 
horse until he is grown up, when that form of expression is 
not familiar to him. If a gap occurs, and is allowed to 
continue up to the age of thirteen or so, he will almost cer- 
tainly become self-conscious and lose this form of free expres- 
sion. Summer playgrounds and evening play centers should 
have many little plays, and dramatizations of fairy stories 
and other things that are read aloud, supplemented by 
games Hke Dumb Crambo (impromptu pantomime) and by 
charades. And in every family children ought to do charades 
and little dramas on Thanksgiving and other family occa- 
sions. 

A great deal is to be done even with grown people in 
developing informal dramatics. Miss Charlotte Rumbold has 
told of groups in St. Louis who reproduce a play of Shake- 
speare from what they remember after seeing it, improvising 
the words as they go along. Offhand dramatization might 
well become as much cultivated as other forms of sketching. 

Impersonation also outlives the dramatic age not only in 
the drama but in its original form, in which the motive is 
to make an imagined personality more real not to other 
people but to one's self. The dramatic age, in fact, survives 
in patches ; there are occasional returns to the old dispensa- 
tion for a long time after the first coming of the new. There 
is the phase of enacting historic scenes, crossing the Dela- 
ware, repelling the English at Bunker Hill (with invariable 
oversight of the final outcome of that famous battle). Girls 
play dolls up to the age of thirteen or so, and boys play sol- 
dier or Indians for an equal period, with huts, home camps, 
ai;d much crawling on the stomach, leaping out from the 
underbrush, scalping, taking and rescuing of prisoners — 
punctuated of course with the crack of the scout's long and 



300 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

trusty rifle. I remember years, continuing up to the age of 
fourteen, during which the customary greeting was : " Draw, 
dog, and defend thyself," while "Thieves, dogs, rabbits, I 
spit upon you," from the recorded sayings of Le Renard 
Subtil in "The Last of the Mohicans," was a well-worn form 
of repartee. Some of us also had "guns," with which we 
would charge bayonets in a long gleaming line of two against 
our country's foes, while there were frequent hurried rally- 
ings to the seashore to repel pirates (boats carrying leg o' 
mutton sails) which greatly terrified us, although at other 
times we were on the best of terms with the friendly fisher- 
men who sailed them. Everybody has felt the thrill of 
Stevenson's Lantern Bearers — an instance of imagination 
in the service of the later conspiring instinct. Howells 
records how the boys in his town every year made little 
carts "to go into the woods and get nuts," although no boy 
was ever known to use his cart for such a purpose. Most 
children dig for treasure and also bury treasure chests and 
make other wonderful hiding places which they never use. 

Perhaps some of the cases I have just cited should be 
placed in an intermediate class between impersonation 
proper and competitive games containing only a slight dra- 
matic element. The language of chivalry, for instance, was 
accessory to a special form of single combat with wooden 
sword and shield, and that of Le Renard Subtil to a style of 
Indian warfare closely resembling "robbers and policemen" 
in its practical working out. 

Children's building play has usually an element of the 
dramatic even during the Big Injun age. I knew a little 
girl of seven to make with stones a most elaborate represen- 
tation of Tuscany in illustration of Horatius, her favorite 
poem; and I remember a "city" on the beach, oft con- 
sumed (or crumbled by the sun) and oft rebuilded, of which 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 301 

the principal features, besides sand houses of the usual bee- 
hive shape, were a theater, a sea wall, and especially a rail- 
road system with full equipment of engines and rolling (or 
rather sliding) stock, by means of which a lively trade in 
corks, tanbark, sea eggs, and other staples was carried on, 
and which lasted until the citizens reached ages ranging from 
about eleven to sixteen. 

An interesting example of the gradual change of accent, 
in building play, from the earlier set of motives to the later 
one is in Stanley Hall's " Story of a Sand Pile," in which from 
impersonation (by proxy through the wooden inhabitants of 
the city which the children gradually built up) the interest 
shifted to realism of mechanical execution in the building of 
houses, roads, etc, — only the "people" themselves, who, as 
veritable daidaloi, had become conventionalized, continuing 
the old regime in opposition to the new spirit of improve- 
ment. 

And, finally, impersonation during the Big Injun age 
sometimes survives, not as an accessory of some other form 
of play but as a primary object. Boys sometimes, I am told, 
even to the sere and yellow leaf of the college age, will be 
knights and heroes very seriously in some small circle of 
their own. I know a lady who still stamps her foot and 
carries her head like a spirited charger, as a result of being 
the Chevalier Bayard up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts ; 
and a schoolmaster has told me that when he was at board- 
ing school, up to the college age, he always thought of him- 
self in all his lessons and games as performing some heroic 
action of an entirely different, imaginary sort. 

It is to be observed that in these cases the impersonation 
was not of natural objects nor of merely interesting beings 
like mothers, horses, yachts — as is so often the case during 



302 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the dramatic age — but alwaj's of a personal ideal ; and I 
think all important instances of such survival will be found 
to be of this sort. Impersonation survives, evidently, as a 
method of projecting an ideal of life and conduct, but not of 
imagining the outside world. It is Froebel's game of the 
knights outlasting the dramatic age. The child uses it as a 
means of getting possession of his ideal by taking the first 
step towards its realization. Not content with merely 
visualizing the heroic character, he insists upon the more 
realistic method of muscularizing it — learning not merely 
the look but the feel of it, bringing it home in the most inti- 
mate way, giving it body and carrying power for thought and 
feeling. 

There is great potential value in impersonation of this sort. 
Every soldier — everybody else for that matter — knows 
the intimate relation between bodily carriage and morale. 
To stand right and move right, especially if such standing 
and moving proceeds outward from an ideal, is in itself an 
important part of conduct and the beginning of much more. 
To adopt the voice and bodily carriage of Bayard or King 
Arthur is to go some way toward possessing their spirit and 
moral attitude. It creates a habit of body and mind that 
is a barrier against evil and must be radically changed if 
anything mean or cowardly is to be undertaken. 

There are dangers, of course, in such a method. If there is 
a neglect steadily to translate the ancient into the modern 
requirements, to recognize and respond to the demands of 
knighthood as they occur in sictual daily life, the result may 
be disastrous. There are plenty of Sentimental Tommies 
whose heroism, like that of the great Tartarin, is of the 
imagination only. But if you can get King Arthur actually 
to enter your soul, and fight for you in the schoolroom and on 
the playground, he is as valuable an ally as any boy need have. 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 303 

This surviving tendency toward pure impersonation is 
important not chiefly in itself, but as indicating the direction 
of the purely imaginative play of the Big Injun age, or at 
least of the most important part of it. Imagination, now as 
always, has an essential part in any act of understanding 
and in almost any kind of enterprise ; but its greatest func- 
tion henceforward is to make the first projection of the soul 
in action — to be the earliest embodiment of the ideal. 

Imagination is the budding of new life. It is action in 
the soft, achievement in its initial stage. When the boy acts 
Roland he is taking the first necessary step in becoming the 
hero of some future Roncesvalles. His impersonation of 
Launcelot, the saga he sings to himself over his bath in the 
morning and whenever outer voices die away and he can 
hear the inner music, are the prayer that shall make a Launce- 
lot, a Roland of him — shall at least project him toward the 
heroic character with such impetus as he can manage to 
gather. Imagination is the first reaching out of the spirit, 
the first shaping of aspiration. It lights up the path that 
thought and desire will follow. It illumines the goal of action 
and draws it on, and through action governs life. It is the 
first movement of growth and the director of all its later 
processes. 

Do not say that the child of the Big Injun age has no 
imagination, that this is a hard philistine period in which all 
poetry for the time at least is dead. It is a mistake — the 
great mistake of all — to suppose that because the child 
has lost his illusion of the plasticity of the outer world, his 
desire to mold it as his soul demands has lessened, or that 
imagination, his former means of its summary transfigura- 
tion, has disappeared. Nothing could be farther from the 
truth. The child, indeed, no longer possesses the magician's 
wand; make-beUeve is no longer the equivalent of reality. 



304 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

It is also true that, awakened to the contrast between his 
gorgeous fancies and his puny power of reaHzation, conscious 
of the ridicule a disclosure of his dreams may bring on him, 
he becomes intensely secretive. Of all wild creatures the 
child of the Big Injun age is shyest and most diflBcult to 
tame. To most people he is utterly impenetrable. Many 
boys, perhaps the majority, are so to all grown-ups, including 
their own parents. But it is still, in the toughest, most anti- 
sentimental boy, the inner world, the world of imagination, 
in which the important part of his life is carried on. The 
saddest and most fatal misunderstandings between children 
and their parents or teachers arise from the failure on the 
part of grown people to recognize the intensity of this inner 
life, or from their supposing that the child's real thought is 
simple or easily visible to them. If that is your idea, you 
have not taken the first step in the understanding of the child 
of this or any other age. 

The method of those who really understand is described by 
Emerson : 

" Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of 
the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, 
of the rivers and the sea ? When he goes into the woods, the 
birds fly before him and he finds none ; when he goes to the 
river bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave 
him alone. His secret is patience ; he sits down, and sits 
still ; he is a statue ; he is a log. These creatures have no 
value for their time, and he must put as low a rate on his. 
By dint of obstinate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird and beast, 
which all wish to return to their haunts, begin to return. 
He sits still; if they approach, he remains passive as the 
stone he sits upon. They lose their fear. They have 
curiosity too about him. By and by the curiosity masters the 
fear, and they come swimming, creeping and flying towards 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 305 

him; and as he is still immovable, they not only resume 
their haunts and their ordinary labors and manners, show 
themselves to him in their workday trim, but also volunteer 
some degree of advances towards fellowship and good under- 
standing with a biped who behaves so civilly and well. Can 
you not baffle the impatience and passion of the child by 
your tranquillity? 

" Can you not wait for him, as Nature and Providence do ? 
Can you not keep for his mind and ways, for his secret, the 
same curiosity you give to the squirrel, snake, rabbit, and 
the sheldrake and the deer? He has a secret; wonderful 
methods in him ; he is, — every child, — a new style of 
man; give him time and opportunity. Talk of Columbus 
and Newton ! I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel 
is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs." 

The Big Injun, in spite of his hard practicality, his hunger 
for the concrete, is an idealist at heart. It is indeed, as we 
have seen, the very insistence of his ideals that has given 
him his hunger for actuality. Imagination is not opposed 
to the obsessing desire for self-assertion, but is on the con- 
trary an essential part of it. It is the first stirring, necessary 
preliminary to authentic outward projection, of the true 
self. In every child, at his most philistine period, the 
poetry is still there, the first and most important element of 
growth, though the stream has suddenly sunk underground 
and left only the hard dry crust visible to a superficial 
observer. 

Imagination at the age we are now considering, although 
surviving impersonation gives the key to it, takes commonly 
a more abstract form. The child, become acutely conscious 
of the contrast between the imagined and the real, builds 
his castles out of confessedly imaginary materials. His 
method is sometimes that of the daydream — long, long 



306 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

thoughts of what he is to do or be, of the princess he will 
rescue, the dragons he will slay, the better social order he 
will build. As the boy is father to the man, so is the day- 
dream the special moment of his parenthood. It is the 
source to which, if all goes well with him, the stream will 
ultimately rise. The man is the incarnation of what the 
child has done, and the first form and instance of the child's 
doing is in his dream. 

Or the method may be that of heroic fiction. Children 
often tell stories to each other. They tell about when they 
were sailors in that strange grown-up past in which such 
wonderful things take place, — the past golden age which 
is really a first rough sketch of future glories. Perhaps they 
describe " what they did when they were little " — some three 
inches high — and went to sea on toy boats ; how they passed . 
through those harrowing but triumphant experiences at 
boarding school; how they met Fairy Cross-sticks yester- 
day, or the Ghost with the Bare Nose, and of the conversa- 
tion that ensued. Such narratives are continued at inter- 
vals, like a serial story, for months, — sometimes for years. 

And a great part of the imaginative life is now in reading 
or hearing books and stories. Vast and fascinating realms 
are opened out which the child recognizes and appropriates 
as his own and in which he wanders with delight. 

These various methods of imagining are not very different 
in effect. From listening to the story of Robin Hood, or 
telling each other the story of when you and I were Robin 
Hood and Little John, to going out and being Robin Hood 
in the back lot, the change is chiefly one of form. If there is 
greater intensity in the more active method, there is greater 
freedom in the other. As you sit looking in the fire while 
your mother reads, you can always be Robin Hood yourself 
— or Sir Galahad, Tom Sawyer, Tom Brown, Heidi, Sir 



IMAGINATIVE PLAY 307 

Launcelot, Sir Lamarack, or Sir Bors de Ganis, as the case 
may be — while in actual impersonation there may be diffi- 
culties; other children are so mean, they always want the 
best parts for themselves. But whatever the comparative 
merits of the different methods the experience in all three 
cases is essentially the same. In all these heroes, whether 
heard about or impersonated, the child recognizes himself, 
finds the first expansion of what he feels that he is meant to 
be. It is the experimental modeling of action in material 
furnished by the imagination, as a sculptor models his statue 
in clay before it is cut in stone. 

And the need which all these forms of imagination fulfill in 
the child of the Big Injun age is a need common to all chil- 
dren and to all mankind — the need to dream. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

THE NEED TO DREAM 

The business of life is the translation of ideals into action. 
In this business there are two essential parts : interpreting 
the ideal and mastering the outward conditions of its realiza- 
tion. Or, to put it in another way, there are two duties in 
this world, and only two : to find out what it is you want 
to do, and to do it. To these two processes there are two 
parts of education to correspond, namely, the development 
of imagination, and the study of the outer world. The Big 
Injun, as we have seen, is obsessed to find out about the 
outer world ; but he is equally obsessed, though less visibly 
so, to set forth in imagination the demands of his own soul. 
It is indeed largely the power of imagination that makes his 
contact with reality so fierce and resolute. 

The need of imagining — what I have called the need to 
dream — is the need of building castles in the air before 
trying our architectural conceptions upon the tougher 
susceptibilities of bricks and mortar. This need is vital, 
absolute, and universal. Such dreaming is a part of the life 
process, a necessary step in the translation from instinct 
through achievement into growth. 

Life consists in putting together again the world which 
the disillusion of the Big Injun age has torn apart. The 
reuniting of desire and actuality, the subjection of outer 
nature and of our own acts to our ideal — such is the aim 
of all human striving, the inclusive object which we all seek. 
The successful man is he who can perform the miracle of 

308 



THE NEED TO DREAM 309 

Orpheus, make sticks and stones and trees and animals, and 
perhaps finally his own body and impulses, obey the inner 
music. 

This reconstruction of our world is not a simple process. 
An instinct cannot be translated immediately into outward 
acts : from inspiration to execution is more than a single 
step. Between the first stirring of the god within, felt 
merely as a pain, to the laying of one stone upon another in 
the growing edifice, there is a world of effort and endurance 
to be faced. It is in this interval that all the important 
questions are decided — the questions of life and death and 
of the degree of life to be attained. It is here that the 
moral drama is enacted, that the pain of daring or of wait- 
ing, the very throe of creation, is undergone. When the 
definite purpose has been formed, the fight is already lost or 
won. 

And in this process of translation from crude instinct to 
finished act the first conscious step is the dreaming of the 
dream, the seeing in a vision what the soul demands. You 
cannot form a purpose, you cannot even make a plan, until 
out of the center of your unrest there has condensed itself 
some first presentment of the object to be sought. To 
translate directly from a divine discontent into the outline 
of a finished poem or statue or political institution is impos- 
sible. You cannot draw up specifications from a mere un- 
easiness : the ideal must take on form and color in the mind, 
must become alive, irradiated, possessed with brilliancy and 
momentum, if it is to give its law to overt act or to any plan 
for such. This is the crucial process in every act and in 
every life. It is the prerequisite of all success. 

And the degree of success will depend upon the fullness of 
the vision. The more concrete your ideal — the more 
vividly it lives and acts in you — the more adequately will 



310 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

it be possible to sketch its outline and fit a plan to it. If the 
vision is full of life and color, you may by good fortune 
reduce some suggestion of it to the sharp lines prerequisite 
to practical achievement. Your plan may in that case have 
some touch of the living truth, contain some hint of the 
glory that lives in the heart of a creative instinct and that 
was the divine source of your attempt. And it is only so 
that you can hope to seize and give expression to the pushing 
life within. First build with air and rainbow ; you will 
show yourself an able architect if you can catch one half 
the beauty the god has whispered to you, even in such easily 
wrought material. 

The seeing of the vision is not an easy thing. To see at 
all is given only to those who will possess their soul in patience 
till the vision comes. It was no false report of the world's 
artist race that represented the god as first appearing in a 
cloud. Translating the word into the image is like drawing 
from memory. The thing first appears as a face in the 
mist, a vague leading here, an adumbration there. The 
process of reducing it to possession is like taming a wild 
creature. To go a step beyond the revelation is to lose it : 
it flees from sudden reduction to crude lines. You must 
watch by the spring, sometimes for months, lucky if you 
catch in its surface a moment's reflection of Pegasus among 
the clouds. And when, by some happy insight, you have 
won a glimpse of your ideal, the danger is that you go away 
about your business — the busy, comfortable, easy part of 
execution — and straightway forget what manner of man 
you were, what you truly had it in you to reveal. The 
spirit comes and goes as it will and must not be too rashly 
interrogated. Specifications too soon demanded imply a 
fatal error. But to him who will wait and listen the 
message may, in a lucky moment, become alive, take on 



THE NEED TO DREAM 311 

power and brilliancy, and mold both' him and outward 
things to serve it. 

I am one who when 
Love inspires me take note, and in the way 
That he doth sing within, I go and tell it. 

It was a great moment in the history of art when Dante 
took note of love's inspiration, greater even than when he 
went and told. This is the idolatry that is also true religion, 
the setting up of an ideal image in the heart. 

Imagination is the beginning of true action. But it also 
in a sense contains the end. For there is this difference 
between vision and execution : execution proceeds by steps ; 
it is methodical and deals with one thing at a time. Inspira- 
tion is of the whole, a vision of the finished product ; its 
office is to govern both plan and execution. If the true end 
is not there at the beginning, the whole work will be cold 
and uninspired. Achievement begins not at the beginning, 
but at the end. 

It is true of dreaming in any form, as of impersonation, 
that it has its dangers. The dream, if it remains a dream, 
may be not a step in successful action, but a dereliction from 
it. The vision of the ideal and the planning of the concrete 
accomplishment should draw together. The great architect 
has learned to dream in stone — feeUng the limitations of his 
material, not separately, but in combination with his vision. 
But still in all great art, in creative action of every sort, the 
dream is there. A man can, it is true, win much apparent 
success and yet not be a dreamer. He can be an accepted 
devotee of the goddess of efficiency, whom we now so devoutly 
w^orship ; but yet he will not be a successful man ; his action, 
not proceeding truly from himself, will not belong to him 



312 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

nor be a fulfillment of his life. It is well to go far and fast. 
It is better still to know where you are going. 

Life comes to us from behind the veil; it wells up from 
some source other than ourselves. Incarnation proceeds 
through our own act in reducing the crude impulse to such 
form of utterance as we can find for it; and the first form 
we give it is the dream. The life process is one of alternation : 
first, listening to the ideal and trying to form an image of 
its prompting, then turning to the practical limitations of 
our nature and our materials and attempting to strike it 
into some working form , then back to the vision and from 
that again to execution. It is alternate sleeping and waking, 
dreaming and attempted realization; and with each true 
attempt the vision itself grows more defined. The danger 
is that we become governed not by our dream but by the 
exigencies and limitations of our material and of practical 
life, find some smart and easy way that succeeds, but involves 
a forgetting of what we started out to do. 

Action is indeed itself a kind of sleep, a forgetting of what 
you meant to do in the stress of doing it. There is an 
ansesthesia of action, a self-hypnotization, a shutting off of 
the intellectual faculties — as seen in the tiger about to 
spring, and as cultivated in a dog which has been taught to 
"point." A study of the absence of this self-hypnotizing 
power of the practical man is seen in Hamlet, the man who 
still ponders when he ought to shut off the thinking faculty 
and get to work. The opposite and far more common vice 
has yet to find its Shakespeare — that of the practical man 
who, in the meeting of insistent claims for action, never 
wakes up, never remembers, or stops to look once more 
toward the heights he started to attain. As action is sleep, 
so it is when he has his dream that the man is truly awake. 



THE NEED TO DREAM 313 

It is in the moment of vision that he is aUve to the larger 
issues, and sees himself and his aims as they truly are. I 
will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help. 
r Our dream must be reduced to action, brought down to 
earth — that is a vital if obvious part of hfe's procedure. 
But the process must not begin there. First catch your 
dream. In order that it may be reduced to reaUty it must 
first exist. 

L The dream is then, according to my contention, an essen- 
tial part of the technique of living. It is of the very grammar 
of action — the first rule in the book and one that every 
child should know. Picturing to himself a heroic life is a 
necessary step in the expression of his instinct to be some- 
body, to have a hf e of his own, to assert himself as an original 
and creative force. Imagination is the law of the oak becom- 
ing conscious, the invisible projection of the future tree. 
It is the first form of the striving to become, the forward 
throe of conscious purpose in the soul. 

And what is true of life in general is true of every form of 
its expression and of each specific act. The dream is as 
necessary to the building of a bridge, the carrying on of a 
campaign, the invention of a machine, as it is to the writing 
of a poem or the living of a heroic life. 

How can the need to dream be recognized in education? 
How can the power of seeing visions be cultivated ? 

First, we must allow ample room, as in the kindergarten, 
for the training of the child's imagination during the dramatic 
age, its greatest period of growth, neither reducing education 
at this period to a training of the sense of touch, nor making 
it .what is called practical. The precious years that nature 
has set aside for the accomplishment of this major purpose 
must not be lost. 



314 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Second, we should extend beyond the kindergarten the 
use of symbols, which stand in the mind for that residuum 
of the ideal that cannot as yet be definitely imagined or con- 
ceived. The symbol — a flag, a cross, the image of a man 
— stands like a star at the point where the vista ends, a 
provisional representation of what is still beyond our sight. 
Something in hand the whilst : the s;yTnbol satisfies our 
hunger for a concrete presentation of the ideal ; not claiming 
itself to be the revelation, it marks the spot where, according 
to our hope, the miracle will at last be wrought. The pro- 
cedure of reducing ideals to action is not unlike the mathe- 
matical device of assuming a solution of a problem as a 
means of solving it. The symbol stands for x, the sought 
but unknown quantity in our life problem. 

A favorite building material of the imagination is music. 
Coming before poetry in the order of development — or 
earlier branching off from the common root of singsong — 
it is for many minds the first of the concentric rings thrown 
off by the soul in action. The empire of the air which Jean 
Paul Richter claimed as the heritage of his country after 
the Napoleonic wars, like the one which Ariel made for 
Prospero, was largely built of music. When Father Jahn 
started his Turn Vereins, with their songs and gymnastics, 
he founded the Germany that now is. That was a dream. 
And what has come of it ? Was it practical ? Ask the Eng- 
lish, or our own business men who meet the Germans in 
neutral markets at the present time.^ Children and nations 
sing before they talk. Music gives form, actuality, momen- 
tum, freed from subjection to detail. It is the first trans- 
lation of the soul in sound. We should, by choruses and 
orchestras, by encouraging every kind of music from the 

* This was written before the present terrible war began. Its 
implication will become true again whatever the result of the conflict. 



THE NEED TO DREAM 315 

violin to the Jew's-harp, bring out the musical power of our 
children. As Mr. Crothers has pointed out, if we have good 
chorus singing there is no longer any need of war. 

And, finally, there are fairy stories, stories of the heroes 
of history and myths which are better because truer than 
liistory. A child should not be fed to any great extent on 
books of useful information. It is true that if the instruc- 
tion is carried in a good story, as in the case of some of the 
Rollo Books, it has its place as feeding the scientific side of 
the Big Injun nature. Such stories, however, will never be 
the most important, and can in no wise take the place of 
those of the imaginative class. Charles Lamb had the right 
of the matter when he wrote in humorous exaggeration : 
"Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of 
the nursery, . . . Knowledge insignificant and vapid as 
Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems, must come to the 
child . . . and his empty noddle must be turned with con- 
ceit of his own powers, when he has learned that a horse is 
an animal and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, 
instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made 
the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to 
be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry 
and no less in the little walks of children than of men. Is 
there no possibihty of arresting this force of evil? Think 
what you would have been now if instead of being fed with 
tales and old wives' fables in childhood you had been crammed 
with geography and natural history. Hang them ! I mean 
the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all 
that is human in man and child." 

Literature is a mold into which the child's life in the 
imagination may be run. There is this great difference 
between that life as carried on in listening to stories and as 
evolved out of his own inner consciousness; namely, that 



316 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

myth and story present the ideal not merely of the individual 
but of the race. Literature is to mankind what impersona- 
tion is to the small child. It is the dream of Man, the gor- 
geous presentation, through the accumulated genius of the 
race, of what all the ages have divined of human destiny, 
the total prophecy of what the human soul demands. Litera- 
ture is the vehicle in which the visions of all the poets, the 
dreams of all the prophets, are handed down. The biological 
importance of infancy, to which man owes so much, is due, 
as we have said, to the margin left in it for education, and 
largely to the child's imitative and social instincts which 
insure his seeking to be educated, and so attaining a social, 
and therefore cumulative inheritance. His mind and heart 
in this way become heirs to what all the generations of 
the race have learned. And it is in the form of literature 
that this precious inheritance is passed along. 

Suggestion is all-powerful in this realm of the transmission 
of ideals. Even in purely ph^'sical performances one sees 
the effect of precedent. A new record in the high jump 
raises the average performance a fraction of an inch. In 
morals much greater results are possible. Heroism, adven- 
ture, moral enterprise, are largely traditional. Our concep- 
tion of the possibilities of human daring is a social product. 
Heroes have progeny wherever their deeds are told. Myths 
and fairy stories, sketching in rainbow colors man's spiritual 
demands, with a royal disregard of physical limitations, are 
to the child the rough draft of his future deeds. Imagina- 
tion, led by these, illumines the patient grubbing work which 
will win results as wonderful as those wrought for Aladdin 
with his lamp. 

Poetry is not merely something made ; in its widest sense, 
of creative imagination, it is the process of all making — 
the first form of all the works of man. It is the original and 



THE NEED TO DREAM 317 

decisive stage in every enterprise. A deed that is not an 
embodied poem is not an act, did not proceed from the 
man, but happened to him Hke a fall or a disease. And all 
literature, as distinguished from encyclopedias, railway 
guides, and other works of useful information, is poetry at 
heart. It is prophetic. Its function is to stake out new 
extensions of the spirit. To childhood, with its vague but 
infinite outlook and small effectiveness, this bodying forth 
of the race's hard-won ideals — drawing the thirst for life 
toward noble objects — is of vital consequence. It is as 
much an element in growth as air or food. No child has had 
a fair chance in life who has not been brought up among the 
great myths and fairy stories. There should be in every 
school, and above all in every family, reading aloud, the stor- 
ing of the memory with the music of great literature, sounds 
that speak directly to the soul and give carrying power to 
great ideas. 

Schools and playgrounds and social centers, by reading 
aloud and story-telling, by classes for parents as well as for 
children, by libraries and literary clubs, by having compe- 
titions of rival poets, new and old, and other occasions to 
which the Muses are invited, may do much to aid in this 
respect. 

It is a pity that so many people think it necessary to im- 
prove upon the forms in which the great myths and stories 
have come down to us, to bring them up to date by inserting 
examples of their own literary style into these masterpieces. 
And then there are the frankly raw and hideous productions, 
above all, the funny picture book — grotesque, nauseating, 
that shrieks across the crowded Christmas shop in colors 
that almost blind the eye, and must permanently warp the 
sensibilities of the unfortunate children who are subjected to 
them. It would be as good a deed as any child lover could 



318 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

perform to clear the stream of children's literature now 
muddied by catchpenny devices to please foolish and un- 
educated parents. 

We must feed the imagination and allow it scope if we 
would have the child grow up. Imagination is the first 
step in the life process ; it is the material out of which all 
achievement is condensed, the medium through which the 
ideal passes into thought and action and through them 
shapes body and mind to serve it. 



I 



BOOK V. THE AGE OF LOYALTY 
CHAPTER XXXVH 

THE BELONGING INSTINCT 

At about the age of eleven, as early as nine in some cases 
and as late as twelve in others, coincidently with the sudden 
upward turn in his curve of growth, the boy begins to play not 
as an individual against other individuals but as a member of 
a team against other teams. He plays football, basket ball, 
hockey ; his baseball takes the form of sides ; his major in- 
terest is in the great team games. Individualistic games, it is 
true, still continue; individual rivalry has even increased. 
The Big Injun spirit survives in more than its former strength, 
but it is no longer supreme; it has become subordinated 
to a mightier power. 

The boy begins, at about the same time or a little later, 
to feel more strongly than before the necessity of meeting 
certain other boys every day — to play a game, if favored by 
surroundings and good play traditions, but anyway to meet, 
for purposes which seem to him sufficient. His life is now 
in this companionship ; it has become his milieu, his social 
complement, his world, as necessary to him as a mother 
to a little child. This relation pervades his life and every- 
thing he does. If he walks, swims, rides, makes jokes, 
converses, it is as a member of a horde. The gentle passion 
itself finds gang expression, chiefly in the disguise of sex 
antagonism. His speech and manners soon show effects of 

319 



320 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

this new allegiance. He comes home full of strange oaths, 
furnished with new and rather trying jokes, with a curiously 
embellished and enlarged vocabulary. He has adopted new 
standards, less civilized but more heroic, a new moral and 
even physical attitude toward the world. The expression 
of his face has changed. 

What has produced these and other notable results has 
been the awakening in the boy of the spirit of membership. 
His paramount desire now is to belong : to live and act, 
succeed or fail — to suffer if need be — not as an individual 
but as a member of a social whole made up of boys of his 
own age ; and the effects of this new desire are seen in every- 
thing he does. What England expects will henceforth be 
his chief guide to conduct. 

The thing that has happened to him in the coming of this 
new spirit into his life is the last and most important of all 
his metamorphoses. The spirit, however, is not wholly new. 
Things do not happen as suddenly as that under nature's 
law. The germ of the team instinct was in him all along, 
and has been represented in his growth at each preceding age. 
The baby playing with its mother showed a social instinct of a 
deep and perfect sort, acting from the very core of its being, 
and successfully expressed. I do not know that we could 
speak of the baby as belonging — as really forming with its 
mother in any accurate sense a social whole — but at least 
the first essential of membership was there in a thorough 
meeting of minds, a full sense that I know what you mean 
and you know what I mean, and I know that you know — and 
so on to an almost infinite degree of mutual understanding. 

In the dramatic age, with its cooperation, and especially its 
ring games, it seems as if the belonging instinct were com- 
plete. And I think it is all there though in a faint and 
rudimentary form : the ring around the rosy really is a 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 321 

team ; but it is hardly one to withstand the rough shocks of 
a competitive and unsympathetic world. 

Then comes the Big Injun age, in which Nature almost 
seems to drop her plan of making the child a member of 
society and to turn her attention to producing an aggressive, 
self-sufficient atom in the animal world. The ends accom- 
plished during this period are nevertheless essential to the 
perfecting of human membership in several ways. 

First, the Big Injun age contributes to ideal membership 
by its service in establishing that very contrast — seemingly 
a contradiction but capable of becoming a harmony — upon 
which such membership depends. What we want in human 
society is not the literal welding of utterly subordinate 
fragments into a simple whole — not a beehive, in which it 
can hardly be said that the working bee sacrifices herself to 
the community, because she seems to have no self to sacrifice 
— but the communion of self-directed individuals in a com- 
mon personality through their voluntary sharing of a com- 
mon purpose. And to this end the firm establishing of the 
basis of individual character during the Big Injun age con- 
tributes an essential factor. 

There is contribution to the social end in view even in the 
definitely anti-social tendencies of the Big Injun. There is 
such a thing as excessive gregariousness. A man may be 
too much a mixer. Without some withdrawal, some pri- 
vacy, there could be no integrity of character. We need to 
recollect, to pull ourselves together, to sound our indi- 
vidual relations to the universe. It is true that our 
strength is proportioned to our relatedness ; that in the ful- 
fillment of our relations, and of the social relation above all, 
our life consists. But a relation has two sides. To lose 
yourself in sociability is to lose the sociability also, for 
two nothings cannot correspond. 



322 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The social vision itself comes chiefly to the solitary soul, 
to Moses on the mountain, to Numa by the spring, to Emer- 
son at Walden. Men ascend the hills to see. It is the man 
at the masthead whose report fixes the course, whose place 
in the ship's company is most vital. Temporary withdrawal 
is not a severing, but a fulfillment, of true relationship. 

What has brought our race so far along the road of spiritual 
development has been the even balance in its composition 
of the centripetal and the centrifugal forces, rendering it 
certain that neither the socialist nor the individualist shall 
ever win, making us forever desire to preserve our individual 
life and yet prescribing the losing of it as the only way. 

The limitation to sociability is almost physical. Graham 
Wallas tells how labor leaders break down under the incessant 
intercourse their position forces on them. We all have our 
social saturation point, and have felt the need of resting our 
faces after maintaining the society grin beyond the limit of 
endurance. As our most genial philosopher remarked to 
his wife at a reception in his own house, " It's hell in there" ; 
so there are times when even the most insatiable hostess 
would gladly change for the North Pole. The boudoir of 
the world's most social race means, as I have said, a place for 
sulks. Society and solitude must alternate if temper, sanity, 
life itself, are to be preserved. 

As in the individual, so in the race the balance is main- 
tained. The gregarious soul, born for village politics, who 
loves slapping on the back, to whom his fellow man is wel- 
come in all styles and at all hours, is offset by the congenital 
old bachelor ; the hermit by the Chautauqua idol. If man 
has in him a power of loyalty equal to that of the bee or ant, 
the power to die for his cause or be burned or buried alive 
for it, he has also a power of social antipathy unsurpassed 
by the wild boar or the rogue elephant or the solitaries of 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 323 

any other species. Our most inveterate misanthropes have 
doubtless been killed off as they appeared, but not so early 
or so thoroughly but that the strain survives. In the race 
as a whole the desire for full communion fights perpetually 
with tlie equally characteristic longing to wander alone like 
a rhinoceros. .Social repulsion is as characteristic of us as 
social attraction. 

The romance of human life is in the conflict and concilia- 
tion of these two elements, the social and the solitary, the 
tame and the untamed — in the nesting of the wild creature 
at our hearth, the stooping of the haughty soul to service. 
The tragedy of life is here also ; and the conflicts that have 
denied to man an easy or an obvious morality. But from 
such conflict all that we most value has been won. Without 
social attraction, membership, there could be no loyalty, no 
patriotism, no morality at all as usually conceived. Without 
social repulsion there would be no opportunity for self- 
collection, for recharging the mind and nerves with our own 
purposes ; there would be no self -direction, eventually no self 
at all. And with the passing of the individual there would 
come the death of society also, and its replacement either by 
a fixed organization like that of the bee, a perfect but un- 
changing mechanism, or else by a perpetual mob, following 
its dream forever in hypnotic trance unbroken by the clarify- 
ing jar of conscious purpose. The temple we are building 
in this world is not made of soft material, easily to be squeezed 
into a mold. It is raised painfully of hewn stone, resistant 
to the tool of the workman, equally resistant to strain and 
pressure once it is wrought and in its place. 

But nature, though she never hurries, never forgets ; 
and although the Big Injun age is largely devoted to estab- 
lishing the individualistic side of human character, her 



324 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

other great purpose of making, of the individuals so formed, 
members of a social whole is not suspended. 

A symptom of the presence in the Big Injun of the coming 
spirit of membership — and perhaps the most important to 
be recognized of all his traits for those whose business it is 
to deal with him — is in his unlimited capacity for hero 
worship. The Big Injun is in the stage of development, as 
regards social membership, so brilliantly illustrated by Car- 
lyle. He cannot as yet be loyal to a social group, but he can 
adore an ideal if presented in the concrete form of human 
personality. And he has a necessity of adoration : if he 
cannot find a Frederick or a Cromwell, he will take a Danton 
rather than go entirely without. 

Boys a little older, at least the demonstrated heroic among 
them, are to the Big Injun a race of demigods. The heroes 
of the diamond and the football field are to him the glass 
of fashion and the mold of form — the latter so literally that 
experts can tell by watching a boy play ball, even by observ- 
ing his conversation or his walk, which particular professional 
he is patterned on. There is no characteristic of his hero, 
no defect even, of gait or speech or gesture, that is not re- 
produced as among the godlike attributes. The sun myth, 
of the deity reproduced in every dewdrop, is perpetually 
repeated in the Big Injun age. Small boys are often de- 
spised for toadying, and often their self-annihilation in the 
presence of their hero goes to extreme lengths, but what the 
attitude stands for is not mean. It is the heroic in their 
idol that commands them, and their service to him is a 
true though awkward form of worship. 

The hero also takes on a character that transcends his 
significance as an individual. He stands in a representative 
relation, has always something of the king, the symbol of 
the group idea and consciousness. 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 325 

So complete is the ascendancy of the hero during the Big 
Injun age, and so generally is he chosen from among the 
successful athletes a few years older, that it may almost be 
said that the way to educate the Big Injun is to educate the 
boys of the succeeding age and let them do the rest, — a 
principle which the great English boarding schools have 
thoroughly understood and used. A hero in any case the 
boys will have ; and he will in any case be an athlete and a 
reputed fighter. Wliat other attributes he shall possess will 
to the boys be a matter of indifference ; and it is here that 
we elders may do so much to turn their idealism into better 
channels than it sometimes finds. If preeminent and shining 
heroism is demonstrated to their experience only in the young 
tough or criminal, they have no choice but to adopt the tough 
or criminal as their ideal. It behooves the rest of us to 
bring within the experience of every growing boy examples, 
as convincing as need be, that a decent youth may be as 
manly as a young tough and even have a few points to spare. 
Each occasion on which such preeminence is demonstrated 
to the physical and moral satisfaction of all concerned eman- 
cipates a widening circle of boys from incipient toughness as 
no other form of preaching ever will. Carlyle would surely 
have been freed from Danton if he could have seen Washing- 
ton as he was, and especially if the two had met in personal 
encounter. 

It is a chief function of the playground to provide a place 
where the boy of courage and enterprise who has not become a 
tough can gain his natural ascendancy. Under which king ? 
There are many potential kings of boydom in every neigh- 
borhood, and there are several potential personalities in each 
of them. Which shall prevail and mold the others in his 
hkeness will depend upon the opportunities at hand. If the 
only chance for heroic self-assertion is in the direction of law- 



326 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

lessness, the lawless boy will prevail. If by the provision of 
the playground sheer grit unadorned by the more glorious 
vices is given its natural chance, the boys will recognize their 
lawful sovereign. The opening of a playground in any 
neighborhood means the return of Arthur, long prophesied, 
to resume his kingdom. 

The hero Is not usually an isolated individual. He has 
his court peopled with attendant deities. The strategic 
point in the composite boydom of any given school or neigh- 
borhood is in the set of big boys and young men who have 
prestige among them. There is always one crowd who are 
par excellence "the boys," a certain set whose supremacy is 
accepted without question, whose opinion is final on all 
subjects, whose ways are the only ways that count. Aloof 
are the gods on their Olympus, be it upper classroom or 
street corner; sparing of speech, sudden and fierce in action, 
deigning no explanation : understand as you may and at 
your peril. But a hint from them goes further than all 
sermons, lectures, punishments, and admonitions from all 
other sources. 

They are, to the reformer, shy birds these Olympians, 
harder to stalk than the chamois or the wild turkey. But if 
you can once gain their confidence and turn them the right 
way, your work is done ; at least in all the greater matters 
of boy morality you can leave the rest to them. And, to 
anticipate a little, there is one encouragement you may have 
from the beginning. The most important thing is present 
in them already. The god they worship is the god of manli- 
ness ; their standard, rough as it looks, is essentially a moral 
standard. They are every one of them dreamers and idealists 
at heart. Show them a better way, which can be their way, 
not some one else's, and they will give you no peace until 
they learn it. 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 327 

Another point of importance is that the child has really a 
whole mythology of heroes. Next to Hercules the fighter, 
though at a long interval, come lesser demigods ; and among 
these Daedalus the cunning craftman holds no unimportant 
place. There is an intellectual side to the child's hero 
worship. Although so persistent an experimenter, the Big 
Injun is a pupil also. He wants to find out, and is no pedant 
as to methods. He is forever hanging about wherever 
mechanical work is going on, watching the blacksmith, the 
carpenter, the engineer, asking endless questions, tagging 
after his elder brother to see him use his gun or his new boat. 
There is no more devout discipleship than his toward the 
skilled in any manual occupation. He is the modern Athe- 
nian, the slave of anybody who will tell him a new thing. 

As Baldwin has pointed out, there is need, for any set 
of boys, of such variety of examples that each may find his 
" copy," some bright exemplar of his own inherited capacities. 
I have known a temperamental churchman to languish in an 
exclusively Emersonian environment, and no doubt a born 
mystic would either die or turn rebel if brought up among 
the Philistines. There are among the children of any neigh- 
borhood rather tragic examples of the ugly duckling. 

Froebel tells the story of a boy of four saying to his mother, 
who called to him and asked what he was about : " I am 
driving the geese out of the front yard : perhaps you 
think it is easy to look after geese." Home membership, 
including active participation in home duties, continues 
its great importance during the Big Injun age. The boy 
follows his father about, and is almost as happy at finding 
he is really needed to hold the end of the board as in 
putting Jimmy out at first ; as proud in running home for 
the hammer as in making a home run. It is easier of course 



328 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

to do the thing yourself, and, as Froebel warns us, it is all too 
easy to snub these importunate helpers. What they want 
is really to be of use, and one convincing experience that 
they only hinder may be enough. The thread is unfor- 
tunately an easy one to break, but remember it is the thread 
that binds your child to you and to his home, that obligation, 
duty, loyalty, hang by it. 

The child belongs to the home in the full sense of thinking 
as the home, acting for it, being it for certain purposes. 
The hearth, even with artificial logs, is still the focus of our 
life from childhood on. The wildest boy loves his home 
unless very bitter experience has at last killed that fiber in 
him ; and when it has done that, it has often killed the boy 
too. More than half the children who go wrong come from 
the small minority of debased or broken homes. On the 
other hand, those who study children not in school merely, 
but in their whole life, to find out how they reach success 
or failure, report that the best single influence in any child's 
life is to have some duty toward the home, recognized and 
respected as such. Home duties give the child a real place 
in the world, a notch that he fits into, social standing and 
personality. He is the boy that chops the wood, and the 
universe could not quite go on without him. There is no 
more moralizing experience for old or young. All social 
workers recognize the vital importance of this relation. The 
chief virtue of probation is that it leaves this taproot of 
character uncut. 

The belonging instinct appears also in the games of the 
Big Injun age. The very gregariousness that draws the 
children together, even though their only employment 
when they meet may be to quarrel or pull each other's hair, 
shows that there is a purpose in their hearts that can only be 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 329 

worked out in common. Indeed the power of the disruptive 
forces withstood testifies to the strength of the cement. And 
although the object of the game itself may be purely individ- 
ualistic, there is a notable triumph of the social faculty in 
the carrying on of any game at all ; and Big Injuns, although 
they cannot as a rule achieve this result unaided, have at 
least the desire to do so, and so much of the capacity that 
a little. suggestion, even a good example, will often help 
them to it. 

The very instinct of competition itself tends toward social 
organization. You may be very intent to beat the other 
boy in the race, but after experience of many contests the 
fair promise of whose morning has been clouded over by the 
many-worded dispute terminating in a general row, you begin 
dimly to perceive that you and the other boy, for the very 
reason that j'ou are contestants, have interests in common ; 
interests, namely, in the establishment and maintenance 
of those rules and regulations without which satisfactory 
contests cannot be carried on. There is no more prolific 
source of legislation than athletic competition, and no re- 
lation in life calls for a more constant exercise of the judicial 
faculty. 

It is true that if the fight were really internecine, no laws, 
even laws of war, would ever arise. The members of the 
cat tribe have been fighting each other doubtless since 
claws were first invented, and they have not developed the 
slightest germ of the judicial faculty or of the sense of humor 
which seems to be its natural accompaniment. But the 
child's need of conflict arises, as we have seen, not from a 
desire to exterminate his competitor but from the combined 
wish to contend against him and to have his own superiority 
acknowledged. His ruling desire is to be somebody; and 
being somebody is a social, not an individual achievement. 



330 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

It is a matter of weighing and measuring and sizing up ; and 
weights, measures, and sizes are social products ; the value 
they indicate depends on social recognition. There is of 
course the temptation to pervert justice, to try to force 
decisions in your favor without furnishing the proof. But 
there is also a motive against such procedure. The child's 
real judge is still himself. His deepest desire is really to beat 
the other boy, not merely seem to do so. By unfair play he 
may possibly cheat the others, and there is doubtless much 
satisfaction in so doing. If the dollar will pass current, why 
is it not a practically real dollar ? But there is still a fly in 
the ointment. Do his best, he cannot entirely and per- 
manently cheat himself. So that each competitor during 
the Big Injun age is, from the nature of the very impulse 
that makes him a competitor, also a judge. 

And besides the interest of each in having a fair contest, 
there is the feeling of all in favor of a successful game, and 
a dim sense of their solidarity in wanting it ; the dawning 
of a common interest is beginning to take captive the com- 
petitive instinct itself, domesticate it, and make it a part of 
the social system, somewhat as the English peoples have 
learned to make the conflict of parties, with recurrent rev- 
olution as one overturns the other, a part of their ordinary 
plan of government; just as, indeed, our whole modern 
society is based on competition. At last the perpetually 
illustrated fact that a society of chronic kickers can never 
play a game begins to be seen against the background of a 
possible orderly arrangement, of which one has had occasional 
experience, and with which one comes to sympathize. The 
final result, in the playing of a real game, is a community 
achievement. The decisions which we at last learn to render 
and support, as to whether Jimmie was out at first, who 
came out last, and whether Mary Ann was really caught — 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 331 

whether given by acclamation or by a single judge — are felt 
as community, not as individual decisions. 

There arises also, beside the judicial, the germ also of the 
legislative faculty. A set of isolated judgments is not 
enough. We must somehow settle, once for all, whether 
over the fence is out and whether the corner of the woodpile 
itself or the outlying stick of wood is in truth first base. 
And so, under the stimulus of dire necessity, the germ of 
the legislative faculty appears. 

And then there is the perennial question of "What let's 
do ? " In the solving of this and other practical and insistent 
problems of public policy a germ of leadership appears and 
becomes localized in certain individuals. Besides the Book 
of Judges there is the Book of Kings. Not personal rulers 
these, but representative, whose pronouncements are re- 
ceived with a favorable or unfavorable clamor, — cries of 
"Come on" vying with those of "Rats!" — while the 
decision trembles in the balance as to what shall next occupy 
the attention of the assembled chiefs. 

It is true that effective judgment and legislation are not 
among the staple products of the Big Injun age, but they 
occur to some extent and are commonly present in a groping 
and premonitory sense of their necessity. The age at which 
efficient judicial and legislative power appears differs in 
different groups. One thing, however, is clear ; so soon as 
these faculties do appear, they should be exercised, the 
children being let alone enough to feel the pinch of anarchy 
and the pressing need of overcoming it. A baseball game, 
for instance, should seldom be umpired from the outside. 
The baseball microbe is strong enough to survive the spirit 
of anarchy in almost any group, and the practice it enforces 
of maintaining social order from within contains the most 
valuable lesson of the game. On the other hand, they ought 



332 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

not to be left to themselves when the consequences will 
merely be the triumph of anarchy with its results of loafing, 
bullying, and desultory mischief. It is a question of fact 
in each case. The thing to do here, as in every other problem 
of education, is to watch and see when the budding power 
begins to show itself, and when it does appear, to leave it 
to the stimulus of those needs and opportunities on which its 
development depends. 

That children of the Big Injun age do not wholly lose the 
direct corporate sense shown in the ring games of the pre- 
ceding period — although as a rule such sense is overborne 
by the fiercer impulses now in the ascendant — is further 
shown in their ability to conduct cooperative enterprises 
when the spirit moves. Big Injuns will often combine in 
building huts ; I have mentioned the case of a sand city of 
their construction, and I know at the present time a Big 
Injun tribe who at the end of every summer go through a 
period of building stoves on the beach. And every stove is in 
truth a corporation, though unrecognized by law, being built 
and carried on by several individuals working as a single 
whole. They speak of themselves as "belonging" to this 
stove or to that, meaning of course not the bricks and sand, 
but the corporate body. "Joey, may I be in your stove?" 
I heard a very small child ask. " Yes, Tottie, I will put you in 
under the ashes." The idea was so familiar that they could 
play with it. The same children personify the beach, where 
they all play together with other groups with whom their 
association is less intimate. "The whole beach knows this, 
has heard that." It is a sort of folk in which each special 
tribe holds an unconscious membership, as each stove, in 
turn, like a family, is a member of the smaller tribe. 

Finally, there are in the latter part of the Big Injun age 
beginnings of a social unity, signs of a rudimentary sense of 



THE BELONGING INSTINCT 333 

membership, within the game itself. First there is the game 
— such as follow my leader, leapfrog, foot and a half — in 
which the children follow each other in a series, and in which 
each feels himself not merely to be leading or following and 
doing his own individual stunt w^hen his turn comes, but to be 
forming a part with others of a single string which is doing 
something as a whole. It is this sense of sharing in a common 
consciousness that gives point to the exhortation of Mr. 
Sam Weller, w^hen Mr. Pickwick and his friends are sliding 
on the ice, to " keep the pot a-biling." Besides Mr. Pickwick 
and Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Weller and the 
rest, there is the slide, the Hfe of which is in the unbroken 
series of sliders, which must not be allowed to languish. 
There is the same feeling of making a single string whenever 
the game is played in that formation. We sometimes say 
that children are like sheep, and it is true that their gre- 
gariousness takes frequently a similarly obsequious or serial 
form. 

It is I suppose because of this string form of membership 
that children love a procession, almost as much as their 
elders and from a very early age. A boy of four marches 
about the parlor, pounding on the waste basket and cele- 
brating his sister, aged two, who walks ahead of him, in a 
continuous outpouring of song, to the tune (more or less) of 
" Marching through Georgia," the burden of which is "Tottie 
is so gay" — much in the style of those bacchanal processions 
immortalized in Greek bas-reliefs. The procession, indeed, 
with its unity in diversity, its continuity and repetition, its 
rhythmic appeal to both ear and eye, is very deep in us. 
The child's first arrangement of his blocks is in a row, and 
his funeral will be conducted on the same principle. The 
procession is the favorite form of political demonstration, 
the most usual gesture of any large political or social organi- 



334 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

zation. Greek religion was largely processional and is so to 
this day in South Italy. The same was true of their drama 
with its strophe and antistrophe. And in our modern 
Athens I have known an old gentleman who could no more 
resist a military band than a small boy can, and who up 
to the age of eighty would run up the street and across the 
Common any day to see the Ancients parade. 

Next there gradually emerges the outline of the game of 
sides, first perhaps in hill dill with the rudimentary team 
experience of a flock scattering in flight and a pack combining 
to make a capture. Then comes prisoners' base with two 
real sides lined up against each other and considerable possi- 
bilities of cooperation. And finally there come the great 
team games in which the contest is, fully and consciously, not 
between individuals but between groups, of which football 
is the culmination. 

And running parallel to the whole series is our great na- 
tional game, suiting itself to every age, from three old cats, 
or scrub, in which the child seeks to stay in all the afternoon 
while the rest hunt balls for him (the very happy hunting 
ground of the Big Injun period), up through games of tem- 
porarily chosen sides, to regularly organized teams — them- 
selves perhaps representing a school or other organism — in 
which each player has his special part assigned. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 

THE TEAM 

What is a boy doing when he is playing football ? What is 
happening to him ? I do not mean what is he doing with his 
arms and legs, though that is often a curious subject of 
inquiry, but what is he doing in his heart : what is it that he 
mainly feels ? Externally the game is a notable phenomenon, 
indicating passionate experience of some sort. What is 
the nature of that experience ? 

In the first place the great fact in football is its preeminence 
as a sheer exercise of the belonging instinct. There is no 
membership more intense than that of the players on a foot- 
ball team. They are possessed by a common consciousness, 
with a completeness hardly found in the associations of later 
life. The team spirit tingles to their finger tips. The team, 
indeed, possesses a nervous organization almost as tense as 
that of an individual and, after one of those wonderful 
problems in arithmetic which the quarterback gives out, will 
throw its eleven members upon a single point with almost as 
complete a unity of purpose as that with which a trained 
boxer strikes with his fist. And what is true of football is 
true to nearly an equal degree of other team games. 

To the boy meantime this utter losing of himself in the 
team, merging his own individuality in the common con- 
sciousness, is not a matter of self-sacrifice. It is on the 
contrary an exhilarating experience. What he feels — or 
would feel if he stopped to have feelings on the subject — is : 
"This is what I wanted all the time, what I had it in me to 

335 



336 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

be but never truly was till now." Losing himself in the team 
is an experience not of self-sacrifice, but of self-fulfillment. 
It is the breaking of a band, expansion to a larger personality. 
The boy in the great team games comes into his birthright 
as a member. 

\ATiat is happening to a boy playing football is the entrance 
into his life of man the citizen, man the politician. It is 
the budding in him of the human faculty of membership ; 
he is coming to himself as the destined member of a social 
whole. The team age is the age when Sir Launcelot the 
knight errant, hero of single combat, is developing into 
Arthur, the loyal king. There is a passage in one of Tenny- 
son's Idylls where Launcelot tells Queen Guinevere how he, 
Launcelot, is all very well in feats of strength, and how, on 
the other hand, anyone may overcome Arthur in a tournament 
where it is a mere question of personal prowess ; but that if 
you want to see Arthur, you must be present at a battle 
where there is something real at stake ; that then his yellow 
hair stands up on end, his blue eyes blaze, and his sword 
flashes like the lightning ; that there is then a spirit present 
not found on the lower plane of the egotistic warrior, and 
lesser souls shrivel up and slink away from before him. 
The Big Injun has given way to something higher. 

The great team games are the best school of the citizen. 
They are nature's final course in expression of the belonging 
instinct. In playing them the boy is not going through 
the forms of citizenship — learning parliamentary law, 
raising points of order, moving the previous question — he is 
being initiated into its essence, participating in the thing itself. 
He is actually and habitually losing his own individuality 
in a larger whole : experiencing citizenship, not learning 
about it. 

Just what this experience of belonging is defies analysis. 



THE TEAM 337 

An accessory of it, included in the consciousness of the 
efficient member, is a sense of the mechanical working 
of the team, and the extension of the personality so as to 
include the team as a piece of mechanism. As a child's 
feeling of himself extends to his bat or oar, to his sailboat 
or double-runner, so it extends to the team. The captain 
throws his men against the opponents' left wing much as he 
might throw a pole or rope. He feels the swing of the move- 
ment in the same way; and each effective member shares 
the feeling. If one boy fails to do his part, it is to all the rest 
like having your arm or leg go to sleep, your rowlock wobble 
or your ax head work loose. This feeling of the mechanics 
of cooperation is certainly an aid to the sense of membership. 
A simple instance is in the game of snap the whip, in which 
each child feels how the strain of the common movement 
runs through him and through the whole line, and how 
everything depends on the sufficiency of each link. Such 
a game gives a realistic sense at least of physical integration. 
So dancing — all combined rhythmic play — has a similar 
effect. 

But the thing itself is not mechanical : membership is 
not a question of physical combining, nor on the other hand 
is it merely a matter even of spiritual cooperation. It does 
not consist simply of helping each other nor of working 
together for the same end. It means working not coinci- 
dently but as a unit, acting not merely together but as one 
person, as though from a common soul and consciousness. 
General Sherman said, " There is a soul to an army as well 
as to an individual man." No precision of cooperation, no 
interlocking of corresponding parts, is its equivalent or 
implies anything of the true experience, though it is likely 
to produce it. As I have said in describing the social play 
of the dramatic age, the only way to belong is to belong. 



338 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Membership exists only as itself : it cannot be compounded 
of other elements. It is like the way you move your arm : 
if you have forgotten how, no description of the method 
will bring it back to you. Because there is no method. It is 
sheer exercise of original power, irreducible to other terms. 

The practically important thing in getting hold of an in- 
herited capacity like this is the depth to which you succeed 
in carrying your experience of it. The question as to any 
given exercise is how thoroughly you had it, how deeply you 
were bitten. The crucial point is establishing the color — ■ 
not the amount, but the degree, not how often you were a 
member, but how fully you belonged. Here if anywhere — 
here as everywhere, but here more vitally because this is the 
most vital power we have — you must lose your life to save 
it: you will exist and grow in proportion as you become 
absorbed. It is the team sense that above all other instincts 
takes the individual beyond himself. What the team purpose 
demands of him that he will do whether he can or not — his 
conception of the possible enlarges in the presence of this 
necessity; his very physical powers increase to meet the 
call upon them. 

Such moral transcendence of the individual by the team 
sense within him is not confined to men. Darwin tells us 
of the sheep dogs of South America, that some are brought up 
with the family, others of the same breed with the sheep ; 
and that the latter accept the flock as their own pack and 
play with the sheep just as if they were puppies, often to the 
extent of tiring them out with too much tag. The dogs thus 
brought up are very fierce in defense of the flock, and will 
quickly drive away from it any of their brothers brought 
up with the man pack who venture near. These latter in 
their turn, though retreating before their own kin from the 
neighborhood of the sheep, are so fierce in defense of the 



THE TEAM 339 

family as easily to repulse any of the sheep dogs who come 
near. In each set of dogs the pack motive is victorious, 
and the only way to secure a fair fight between them would 
be to have the man pack attack the sheep. Sometimes, as in 
the case of the bees, the team appears to supersede the indi- 
vidual altogether and to substitute public for private motives. 

Team play is important because it is the deepest attainable 
experience of membership, the most whole-hearted sur- 
render to the belonging instinct, at the time when this in- 
stinct is establishing its dominion in the boy's heart. But 
there is also in team play, besides the sheer and intense 
expression of the belonging instinct, much practical expe- 
rience of the methods by which a social personality is built up. 
The player learns that a team is, in the first place and always, 
a work of faith. It is created by assuming that it exists 
and acting boldly out from that assumption. It grows as 
its members have power to imagine it and faith to maintain, 
and act upon, the reality of that which they have imagined. 
Each member feels, though without analysis, the subtle ways 
in which a single strong character breaks out the road ahead 
and gives confidence to the rest to follow ; how the creative 
power of one ardent imagination, bravely sustained, makes 
possible the execution of the team purpose as he conceives it. 

You noble English . . . 
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips 
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot. 
Follow your spirits. . . . 

As King Harry sees them, so his men become. The 
power of creative assertion is at its greatest in the making 
of a social whole. The leader is not merely a glorified indi- 
vidual, he is a functionary, an official, — true priest to the 
spirit of the team, or army, or nation, he represents, — mid- 



340 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

wife to the latent loyalty of his followers, servant of all in 
the highest service man can render to his fellow men. 

A participant in team play feels also to the marrow of his 
bones how each loyal member contributes to the salvation 
of the rest by holding the conception of the whole so firmly 
in his mind as to enable them to hold it also, and how the 
team in turn builds up their spirit. And he experiences the 
effect of the disloyal member, the one who refuses adherence 
to the going conception of the team, usually one in whom the 
power of membership is weak, the chronic objector. Again, 
he may go through an episode of revolution, the work not 
of a negative mind but of a true rebel, one not lacking in 
loyalty but whose loyalty was to a different purpose, perhaps 
to a deeper conception of what the team should be. Team 
play gives practical experience of loyalty and its effects; 
sets daily problems in the value of orthodoxy and intolerance 
on the one hand and of protest and revolution on the other. 

The team is of course not literally an organism. Like 
the ring around a rosj^ and other social combinations of the 
dramatic age, its existence is wholly in the minds of its 
several members. It is, as I have said, a work of faith. 
But it is none the less real on that account. It is, on the 
other hand, just because of its purely spiritual nature, very 
dependent on spiritual experience for its development; and 
this experience must be gained at the age set apart by 
nature for the purpose if the power to belong, the citizen 
capacity, is ever to get its growth. 

And in our great group games there is not merely experience 
of the sense of membership and of the methods of its produc- 
tion, but there is definite, severe, and effective training of the 
belonging muscles, of the power of holding the team sense — ■ 
retaining one's image and preconception of a play and one's . 
consciousness of the whole team as carrying it out — in 



THE TEAM 341 

spite of difficulties and in the midst of failure and defeat. 
It is one thing to feel the unity of a company marching and 
wheeling on a level floor ; it is a very different thing to retain 
your sense of organization when there is a tangle of bushes and 
a stone wall between you and the next man on your right. 
And when it comes to holding an accurate conception of the 
rhythm and ictus of the play when one man is trying to 
strangle you and another has got you by the foot, the diffi- 
culty is considerably enhanced. The triumph of the trained 
imagination in still holding its sense of organization under 
such circumstances, is a notable one — especially when, as 
in the most successful teams, the players' grasp of the move- 
ment is of so strong and flexible a nature as to enable them 
not merely to carry it out as prearranged, but to modify 
it in the face of instant and unforeseen emergency. Team 
play toughens the fiber of membership, trains the practical 
belonging power to a high point of efficiency. 

It is a significant and most important fact that in all the 
great games the several players have definite parts assigned. 
They are not merely aggregated, but combined, forming a 
definite whole in which each has his place. They work not 
as a mass but as a team. It is significant that after the first 
years of the age of loyalty, after about the fourteenth year, a 
game does not fully satisfy the boys' team sense unless it 
has this specializing character. There must be not merely 
participation in a given purpose, but participation through 
the fulfillment of specific function. Even a wolf pack has 
organization. The outlyer calls the rest, and waits for them, 
and apparently, when the chase is on, some flank or head off 
the deer while others follow straight behind. In the man 
pack this tendency is very strong. There is a special joy 
in taking part in a definitely organized movement, in being 
one half of the pair of pincers and feeling how the two halves 



342 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

bite. There is peculiar exhilaration in charging down the 
field with the other "end" and pocketing the fullback, in 
throwing yourself, regardless, against the line and feeling how 
the play holds together and shoots the runner through the 
hole. We can all sympathize with the grim joy of the little 
quarterback in a famous play, delaying his pass to the last 
moment, until, when he did send the ball straight to the 
sprinting halfback who made that historic touchdown, the 
whole center of the opposing line, lured by a false hope, went 
down on top of him. There is joy in definite responsibility, 
in the power to identify your own individual contribution. 
A boy wants to know just where he fits : not merely to pull 
with the rest, but to hold up his end. 

This desire is not egotistic. It results not from an indi- 
vidualistic motive, but on the contrary from a desire to 
belong more fully, to intensify the sense of membership. 
It is precisely in order that the team in him may be more 
wholly absorbing that he desires such particularity of service. 
It is true that he can lose himself very fully in the horde or 
mass game, as in later life he may lose himself in a mob ; but 
the point is not to lose himself, but to find the team, Jiot to 
sleep, but to wake up. He would die to the narrower con- 
sciousness in order to be born into the wider one, to be alive 
as he never was before. 

Specialization contributes to the fullness of membership 
because through it the team makes its full claim on the in- 
dividual. In intrusting him with one especial service, it 
stakes its success upon his adequacy, subjects him to the full 
current of its purpose. If shortstop does not field the ball 
when it comes his way, if first base does not catch it when it 
is thrown to him, it will not get fielded or will not be caught. 
In his own especial oflBce each player is the team, all there is of 
it at that point. 



THE TEAM 343 

The relation is the same as that of the child to the home in 
which he has a definite duty to perform. It is the relation 
that saves life and character everywhere. Kipling, in the 
story of "The Ship that found Herself," has the rivets tell one 
another how one time a rivet let go and then the next gave 
way under the strain, and so on until a plate started and the 
ship was lost. To feel that you have a particular thing to 
do in the service of your cause that no other can accomplish — 
that you are, in that one thing, however humble, a live wire 
of the common purpose — is the w^ay of initiation to full 
membership. And it is the only way. Unless you are, in 
very truth, needed for its accomplishment, the stress of 
the common purpose will not run through you. Responsi- 
bility is the great word in education ; the miracle is not per- 
formed through work that can be neglected with impunity. 

As specializing in the great team games arises from the 
boy's own desire for intenser membership ; as separate duties 
are assigned not because the players wish to be kept apart but 
because they desire a closer union than merely sharing the 
same function could ever give, — so always it is the sense of 
unity that enforces the separation and holds each member 
to his part. A team is a living organism, not a mechanical 
contrivance ; it is governed not from without, but from within, 
is held together not by the teachings of the coach, but by the 
team sense of its members. As in every live organism, its 
law pervades it, is present in all its parts. 

Plant an apple twig and there grows up not an edifice of 
twigs but a tree, with roots and flowers and apples. The 
twig was always dreaming of the tree ; it had already roots 
and flowers and apples in its heart. It held its place, par- 
took of the tree life, existed as a twig, in virtue of such 
possession. There is said by biologists to be no great differ- 
ence between the seed of the plant or animal, including man, 



344 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

and any other cell. Yet the seed has in it countless gener- 
ations, in whom the whole inheritance, even to tricks of 
gait and speech, is handed down. And as of every other 
living organism, so it is true also of the team, that each 
one of its members contains the whole. Each need not 
indeed know the parts of the other players as he knows 
his own, but each knows the game as a whole and the team 
conception of it ; and he knows his own part not separately, 
but as an item in that general purpose, so that when he acts 
it is not as an individual but as the team in that particular 
syllable of its expression. 

"Shoemaker, stick to your last" is a favorite text of aristoc- 
racy — admirable if not taken in the aristocratic sense. 
It is indeed through sticking to his last, and only so, that the 
shoemaker can be of service ; but he must stick to it not by 
grace of cobbler's wax, nor through any other external power 
or contrivance, but through his own sense of what the com- 
munity requires of him ; the same sense — shared by him and 
all other citizens — that also assigns the aristocrat his part, 
if haply he has any to fulfill. 

Which of the great team games gives the best training in 
effective membership is a somewhat academic question 
because these games, being played at different seasons of the 
year — baseball in the spring and summer, football in the 
fall, hockey and basket ball in the winter — do not conflict. 
As between our two greatest games, football and baseball, 
authorities differ. In the old days before Rugby had been 
got down so fine as it is now, there was in it more scope 
for imagination and independence than in baseball. Now, 
however, when the game is so thoroughly worked out before- 
hand, and the combinations so generally foreseen, that the 
players, except the quarterback, have little to do but execute 



THE TEAM 345 

maneuvers in which they have been minutely drilled, it 
has much less of this advantage. In baseball, on the other 
hand, the combinations present themselves so suddenly that 
the player must rely largely on himself. He may have been 
carefully taught what to do in every possible combination, 
but he never knows which combination is coming; much 
must always depend upon his judgment and presence of 
mind. In football the fault of the weak player can more 
often be atoned for by the strong ones; of baseball it is 
peculiarly true that each must do his part or it will not be 
done, that the team is no stronger than its weakest link. 
Still, for football it must be said that its emotional appeal is 
deeper, that it brings the whole nature into more intense 
activity than any other game. It is often found in practice to 
reach the toughest and wildest spirits as nothing else will do ; 
and it is noticeable that under its spell they play in silence. 
It is a national misfortune that our most popular game is 
one requiring a prairie for its accommodation. And as yet no 
substitute has been discovered. Playground ball, squash 
ball, and other modifications have had considerable success, 
but none of these have come to seem like real life to boys over 
twelve. Rugby football, on the other hand, can be made, 
so far as preliminary practice is concerned, a fairly space- 
economizing game. One of the best boys' teams I have 
known about was developed in the basement of a church 50 
by 30 feet in area, less a stairway and six brick posts. It 
would in my opinion be not only a great advantage from the 
point of view of finding room for all the boys to play, but an 
improvement in the game itself, if the size of the official 
field were greatly lessened. Such a change would increase 
the amount of scoring, lessen the present absurd number of 
tie games, and what is of even greater importance, would 
make a score imminent all the time. Tennis, with its 



346 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

background of some two thousand years, conforms to a 
truer psychology in this respect. With boys of fifteen or so 
I have found a football field 25 yards long by 30 yards wide 
more popular than a larger one, when they were playing 
for the game without reference to its more august conven- 
tions. Soccer, partly because of its lesser serious effect upon 
the wardrobe, is a more available game than Rugby, and 
better for general and informal use. William A. Stecher 
and other leaders are performing a national service in de- 
vising and popularizing games leading up to soccer, and such 
subsidiary games as volley, dodge, and captain ball. Rugby, 
however, goes deeper than any other game, and because of 
its roly-poly opportunities is also especially adapted to the 
very young. 

The team gajne gives the deepest experience of the belong- 
ing instinct, at the time when it is setting its stamp upon the 
mind and character. It is through the team games that the 
power not only to think but to feel in terms of a larger per- 
sonality gets itself set most deeply in our blood and bone. 
This is the power that makes the patriot, the loyal member. 
It is not so much a power to act as a capacity for being acted 
on, for being caught in a larger orbit than that of individual 
desires. Without possession of this sheer belonging power, 
all group action would be impossible. A regiment can charge 
a fort as no aggregation of individuals could ever do, because 
the regiment will reach the fort if it has the courage to keep 
on, and can thus feel the inspiration of the whole movement 
and of what it may accomplish. It may lose half its number 
and yet its blow will be delivered. Even if the whole regi- 
ment is lost, there is the team sense of the army back of it ; 
some other regiment will land the telling blow. 

A collection of individuals, on the other hand, could never 
charge — at least not in the same blazing spirit of success — 



THE TEAM 347 

because for each of them the chance of ever getting there 
would be too small. No single soldier could look forward 
to a fair prospect of serving a useful purpose by his sacrifice : 
he could offer himself for martyrdom, but could not feel the 
thrill of an immediate contribution to the result. A regi- 
ment can charge because a charge is rational if you think in 
regimental terms. It is a weapon big enough to deliver that 
sort of blow. Indians, though almost incredibly brave in- 
dividually, rarely charge, because their team sense has never 
developed that especial form. The Zulus, on the other hand, 
whose team sense is very strong in this direction, will, as an 
English officer who had seen them once expressed it to me, 
"charge up to breastworks defended with repeating rifles, 
with nothing but a spear and a smile." They come against 
any odds like a great wave, in a single, fused, tribal deter- 
mination to sweep over and submerge all obstacles; those 
who are stacked up dead against the breastworks have done 
their part. Negroes in this country, with the high power of 
social fusion for which we laugh at them, have distinguished 
themselves in a similar way from Fort Wagner to San Juan. 

Without the team spirit we could never strike with more 
than the weight of a single individual, could never accom- 
plish, in any direction, more than can be done by acting 
severally, with more or less coincidence in time. 

Although the great team games are the highest expression 
of the belonging instinct, an equally natural form, at least 
during the esLvly part of its ascendency, — saj' from eleven 
to fourteen or so — is in the raid or foray. Great satisfac- 
tion is to be found during this period in some combination of 
stalking, chasing, stealing, rescuing, and absconding, pref- 
erably directed against another gang — those other fellows 
— whom it is a joy to threaten, harry, despise, make the 
subjects of intertribal wit and repartee. I think we all of us, 



348 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

in our early teens, can almost remember the happy days 
when we used to get up in the gray dawn, steal down to our 
trusty ship awaiting us in the creek (the wick of the Vikings), 
hoist the dragon flag and steer across to the other shore, there 
to surprise and rout our enemies, smash and pillage to our 
hearts' content, and then sail home, exchanging brilliant 
sallies with such of the inhabitants as ventured back to the 
beach to yell and shake their fists at us. Somewhere there or 
thereabouts, I think, is the true aim of life as the boy feels it. 
This desire is very fully satisfied in the raiding game ; and, as 
I have already said, everything necessary should be done to 
preserve I spy, robbers and policemen, white men and Indians, 
and other games of that class. They are not easy games to 
play in most cities, but they are possible in many suburbs 
and residential districts. And then most people still live 
outside of the cities in places where children have at least 
room to grow. 

Perhaps it should be said before leaving the practical dis- 
cussion of team games that they will all bear watching, foot- 
ball especially. In the first place there is the physical danger. 
Many boys, under the unnatural strain that the excessive 
attention of their elders to athletic success brings upon them, 
overdo in games as well as in rowing and track events. Aris- 
totle reports that few boy prize winners in the Olympic 
games develop into men prize winners ; and he attributes the 
fact to overstrain. There should be careful medical super- 
vision of all school and college athletics by men who will 
continue, under all forms of pressure, to consider health and 
future usefulness more important than present athletic vic- 
tory. Boys left to themselves, indeed, would not go far 
wrong in this respect. They put their whole soul into the 
game, but do not kill themselves before the game begins by 
overtraining; except when there is something the matter 



THE TEAM 349 

with their hearts, they could for the most part be trusted. 
But there is now no hope of their being left to themselves; 
newspapers and graduates will see to that. The only safety 
is in substituting a calm and deliberate for an overstimulat- 
ing and largely hysterical interference. 

Regulation is necessary also on moral grounds. Royce's 
loyalty to loyalty — respect for the self-devotion of the other 
side as an example of the spirit of loyalty which both sides 
obey — is a plant of slow growth. The first attitude of 
boys towards their opponents is seldom governed by that 
spirit; and when left to themselves they do not as a rule 
develop it. Even our colleges have not been especially suc- 
cessful in that direction, though there has lately been con- 
siderable improvement. 

Teaching in this matter is not, it is true, an easy thing. 
The method, to succeed, must not be too direct. You can- 
not say, "Now, fellows," and then proceed to lay down the 
moral law as applied to football with any just expectation of 
success. Suggestion is a better way. And the suggestion 
must be subtle, atmospheric, a matter chiefly not of speech 
but of attitude. A very few explanations, mostly private, 
of how the sort of thing you desire to discourage looks from 
the other side may help ; but in the main the best teaching 
will be through silent and decisive assumption that such and 
such is not the way we do. 



CHAPTER XXXIX 

THE GANG 

The belonging instinct during the period we are consider- 
ing has other manifestations besides team games. Often a set 
of boys will meet day after day when there is no game to be 
played and very little else to do ; sometimes they simply meet 
and hang around, their object being apparently to do nothing 
at all and do it together ; sometimes, on the other hand, they 
find a great deal to do of a sufficiently strenuous sort, not 
always in accordance with the laws and usages of civilized 
society. In short, boys during the age of loyalt}', and es- 
pecially between the ages of twelve and sixteen, are prone 
to form the gang, of whose adventures and evil deeds we hear 
so much, — the drove, pack, original boys' club, first expres- 
sion of enduring membership outside the family, original cell 
of a society of equals. 

Just what percentage of boys belong to gangs at one time 
or another has never been carefully ascertained, so far as I 
know. The proportion is said to vary according to race, 
opportunity, and social position, the gang tendency being 
high among the Irish, and among those of meager oppor- 
tunities in other directions, low among the Jews and the 
well-to-do.^ I suppose it is an underestimate to say that the 
majority of boys belong to gangs at some period of their 
career ; and the proportion of those whose belonging instinct 
has a tendency toward this form of expression, and under 

^ See "The Boy and his Gang," by J. Adams Puffer, a valuable 
treatise on this subject. 

350 



THE GANG 351 

favorable conditions would result in gang membership, is 
much higher. The gang is, at all events during the period 
in which the belonging instinct dominates growth and edu- 
cation, that instinct's most highly developed and revealing 
manifestation. What, then, are its essential characteristics ? 

In the first place there is no doubt that the gang is a real 
social body, a true persona, or subject of common member- 
ship such as I have attributed to the team and, in a more 
rudimentary form, to the ring of the dramatic age. ^Vhat- 
ever else its members may or may not do, they certainly 
belong. And the members of a gang belong, if not more 
deeply, at least more inclusively, for a wider variety of pur- 
poses, than do the members of a team or any other body 
during this stage of growth. 

The forms in which the gang finds expression are very 
numerous. I will state them in their observed order of 
preference. 

First come the regular team games. For a team may exist 
not only for its own purpose as a team, but also as a repre- 
sentative of another more inclusive personality. Teams 
represent schools, colleges, cities, even nations. And so they 
are often expressions of the gang; or conversely the team 
itself may grow into a gang, its membership coming to be of 
the more general sort. Team play also takes place within 
the gang ; in that case the gang spirit itself has a legislative 
and judicial part, as judge, promoter, and patron of the sports. 
\'ery popular, and coming very natural to the gang, are the 
raiding games of I spy, white men and Indians, variety. 

Team games are the best, and certainly from a grown-up. 
point of view the most convenient, expressions of the gang ; 
but they should not be the only form of its activity. There 
are other innocent methods of expression; and then I am 
not sure that the gang ought to be wholly innocent in its 



352 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

activities. When is a boy going to cultivate the less innocent, 
undovelike but necessary, qualities if he does not get such 
training in the gang ? 

Next to team games come the more direct and primitive 
expressions of the instincts on which these are based. The 
instinct of tribal war, which forms evidently the basis of 
football and to a less extent of baseball, hockey, and so many 
other games, finds satisfaction in fights with rival gangs, 
the preferred weapons being stones, sticks, and snowballs, 
the use of which satisfies the subsidiary throwing and striking 
instincts so important in baseball, hockey, and other team 
games, with resort to fists when at close quarters. Some- 
times these fights are of an international rather than inter- 
tribal nature, — one quarter of a city against another, as in 
the historic snowball fights, sometimes helped out with 
slings, ice, and stones, on Boston Common. A picturesque 
instance of intercity warfare occurred when, two or three 
years ago, the armies of two Boston suburbs met, some thou- 
sand in all, on the ice of Mystic River to settle certain dif- 
ferences of opinion, — on which occasion, after a pretty seri- 
ous encounter, the breaking of the ice followed the breaking 
of heads, and one of the vanquished was drowned in spite of 
the life-saving efforts of the victors. 

Then there are actual raids in obedience to the instinct that 
prescribes the raiding games : the robbing of cellars and 
greenhouses ; swooping down on gardens, orchards, and fruit 
stands ; smashing windows and the glasses of street lamps ; 
stealing street signs, gates, and barbers' poles ; engaging the 
grocery man in conversation while a companion makes off 
with the bananas ; escaping down dark alleys and over roofs 
and by the exercise of many wiles ; breaking, harrying, 
pillaging, and carrying off. A set of boys I knew, who had 
the sea and woods to play in, and plenty of boats, swimming, 



J 



THE GANG 353 

and baseball, nevertheless found it necessary toward the end 
of each summer vacation to go on what they called a raid — 
getting themselves up as tramps, ringing doorbells and de- 
manding food or money, frightening householders or getting 
them seriously excited, and ending in glorious retreat before 
the advance of the patrol wagon. 

The preferred object of these attentions also, is another 
gang. Indeed the whole satisfaction of raiding would be 
greatly impaired if the element of injury to a hostile " crowd" 
were absent ; and the joy is at its height when you can best 
appreciate the feelings of the injured. Indeed the world, as 
assumed by the instinct of this period, is a world of gangs. 
Gang is the normal antagonist of gang as boy is of boy. 

And in every gang there is need of adventure in other forms 
besides that of the raid. For one thing there is a distinct 
locomotive tendency, derived perhaps from the old hunting 
instinct like that of the wolf pack. We all like to run with 
the crowd, and often begin to do so before we ask where they 
are all running to. Just as a dog will get up and bark and 
run with any set of children, so the pack instinct in us comes 
to life in the presence of moving people. Boys like to set off 
together on long tramps, not always piratical in nature. 
There is an especial attraction toward wild places, the sea- 
shore and the woods ; toward hunting, fishing, camping, and 
staying out all night. There is a desire to visit strange coasts 
and cities, to see new scenes and the races of articulate speak- 
ing men. The Odyssey, indeed, ought to be taught during 
this period, when boys are still in Odysseus's class and can 
appreciate him. 

And the gang has an especial love of darkness. We are 

Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the 

moon, under whose countenance we — steal. It is best 

meeting in the dark, best of all at the hour when churchyards 

2a 



354 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

yawn and graves give up their dead, when more things can be 
uttered and beheved than in broad day. Imagination is 
still the leader, at this age as through life, still the first form 
of achievement — action in the fluid state, preceding its 
hardening down to the concrete. And imagination is now 
largely a team product. Boys tell each other things they 
never knew and would not have discovered by themselves ; 
the gang evolves them out of its composite soul. 

Historically I suppose the gang is a survival of the war 
band. Or perhaps it goes back even farther, to the pack of 
young males running by themselves, as in the case of some 
kinds of animals. There certainly is in it a sex antagonism 
— a tendency to class girls with peddlers and old clothes men 
as preferred objects of persecution — which suggest such a 
separation ; as there is a tendency among savages, seen also 
in the ancient Germans and the modern English, to separate 
boys from the home. Perhaps the war band itself is a sur- 
vival of such an aboriginal pack of the young males. The 
German youth flocking to the standard of some young leader 
who announced a raid on Gaul, the young Indian bucks who 
with the stirring of the sap in spring felt the need to join 
the war party of some youthful and ambitious chief, seem to 
have been acting not from a sober economic motive, but rather 
from an inner necessity to go out and pick a fight with some 
one. 

Fighting at all events and fighting games are very close to 
the gang spirit. Indeed so germane to that spirit are the 
fighting and raiding impulses that it might be questioned 
whether they are not integral parts of it, — whether the gang 
impulse itself is not one of get-together-and-fight, or get- 
together-and-raid, rather than simply an impulse to get- 
together, by which these special manifestations are taken on. 
It seems clear, however, that the frequent existence of gangs 



THE GANG 355 

apart from such special manifestations proves that the impulse 
they represent, whatever it may have been originally, has at 
least become separable from fighting and raiding, although 
so frequently combined with these. Of course when the two 
sets of impulses do come together they, as in all such cases, act 
as one ; there is no double consciousness, no rift in the single 
or composite purpose, whatever in a given instan'ce that 
ma}' be. 

It is certain, at all events, that whether it is engaged in 
active hostilities or not, the outside world is under normal 
conditions hostis to the gang. All that are not of it are its 
enemies. And this feeling is due not only to the inherited war- 
like impulse, but partly to the desire for self-realization. The 
gang has enemies because enemies are needed in its business ; 
the}' are a psychological necessity, a prerequisite to its at- 
tainment of full self-consciousness. Csesar tells how the 
Suevi took pride in having as wide a border of devastation as 
possible around them. This was the ancient German and 
English mark — the edge and outline of the tribe, the thing 
that marked it off. A gang can fully know itself only against 
the background of a hostile world. 

And this desire for distinction show^s itself not only in 
hostility but in many other ways. The gang marks its sep- 
arateness by speech, dress, gesture, walk, custom of every 
sort; and every such attribute is made a source of pride, 
every departure from it a disgrace. To be distinguished by 
almost any trait, however absurd in itself, is a source of satis- 
faction to the gang as to the individual. Kipling, who has 
himself preserved the rudimentary gang feelings in all their 
pristine freshness, and so is a direct authority from the world 
of boydom, makes Mowgli revile the Red Dog for having 
hair between their toes. In the eye of the Eternal, hair 
between the toes may be as honorable as no hair, but Mow- 



356 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

gli's wolf tribe had it not and the Red Dog had it ; hence it 
was a hissing and a reproach. 

The humor of the gang is an important manifestation of 
its instinctive attitude toward strangers. It is seldom of a 
sympathetic sort, and is in truth a verbal form of war, its 
purpose being to heighten the gang's own sense of person- 
ality and to lower that of its rivals, to break up so far as pos- 
sible the latter's complacent image of itself. In all inter- 
national humor the same quality inheres. English jokes 
about the French, French witticisms upon the Germans, are 
not usually of a flattering description. America has served 
the Old World well, from the time of Dickens down, as a foil 
to its own perfections. Nations, like gangs, say these 
things of each other not as a result of scientific observation, 
but from an inner necessity. The cause is not in the other 
nation but in themselves. Their object is to heighten their 
national consciousness, and it is not necessary for that pur- 
pose that the foreigner's difference from themselves should 
really be an inferiority. It is not even necessary that it 
should exist. An imaginary trait will serve as well as a real 
one, and one trait about as well as another, for this purpose. 
The relation between membership in our own group and 
hostility to the outer world is deep in all of us. War and 
patriotism are only just beginning to be disentangled. 

War and distinction from outsiders are not the only means 
of heightening the sense of membership. The gang intensi- 
fies its own self-consciousness by customs and observances 
of many sorts; by singing favorite songs, repeating shib- 
boleths and intratribal jokes, and by many other methods of 
self-assertion and celebration. Traditions — the apotheosis 
of its heroes ; recounting the great deeds of the past until the 
tale, whatever its actual origin, becomes fitted to the gang 
ideal — are means to the same end. Every well-established 



THE GANG 357 

gang has Its mythology and its ritual, in which latter there 
should be something of mystery and awe. Many have se- 
cret signs by which the members know each other ; some have 
a special language. Oaths, accompanied by blood-curdling 
rites, are often used, not so much to bind the consciences 
of the members as to impress their imagination through part- 
nership in a dread secret. There is in these ceremonies much 
converse with skulls, skeletons, blood, knives, the dark of 

the moon, 

With more of terrible and awfu' 
Which e'en to name wad be mJawfu', 

for good instances of which the reader is referred to Steven- 
son's "Lantern Bearers" and Thomas Bailey Aldrich's 
"Story of a Bad Boy." 

A common expression of the gang is in the hang-out or 
stamping ground. There is of course the practical necessity 
of having the meetings in some particular place ; and some 
one place will naturally be the most convenient. There is 
also the force of habit to prevent a change. But besides 
these practical considerations there is a clear tendency to- 
ward localization, the identifying of the gang consciousness 
with some especial place. The Franks easily become the 
French, children of the land of France, until France becomes 
to them la patrie, the Fatherland, the goddess of their tribe 
consciousness. Even a dog soon learns where your land 
ends, and takes a wholly different attitude toward strangers 
and other dogs as soon as they cross the boundary. The 
hang-out may be a hut, a deserted shed, or merely a street 
corner. The gang likes best a place that it can fix up for 
itself — bestow its treasures in and decorate to suit its special 
taste. At all events the meeting place must not be domi- 
nated by an ahen power. And it must not be wholly finished 
or too clean. It is hard for a gang to become domesticated 



358 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

in a model club room or a best parlor. A clergyman of my 
acquaintance, on taking possession of a house provided by his 
parishioners for social work, kicked a hole in the plaster by 
way of inauguration ceremony, in order, as he explained, to 
make the boys feel more at home in it. 

But after all the most important thing about the gang is 
the strength of the sheer belonging impulse which it repre- 
sents, a strength sufficient by itself to prescribe the occupa- 
tion (or the idleness) of many hours. The gang does not so 
much meet to do things as do things for the sake of meeting. 
The exercise of the belonging instinct is, in this case, its own 
reward. 

College societies well illustrate the exuberance of this 
instinct in its pure state, unmixed with any extraneous pur- 
pose or desire. The members join these organizations not in 
order that they may take part with others in accomplishing 
a specific object, but simply in order to belong; and their 
sole activity in many cases, once they do belong, is to take in 
other members so that they may belong also. These in turn 
take in still others ; and thus in self-perpetuation the whole 
cycle of the society's activity is complete. It is true that 
college students are beyond the age of the gang proper, but 
then they are a class notoriously privileged to prolong their 
childhood. INIoreover, so far as the exuberance of the sheer 
belonging impulse is concerned, the manifestations do not 
cease with college life. The same characteristic appears in 
many of those societies and orders that spring up so plenti- 
fully among grown persons in our democracy. Indeed the 
majority of us are "jiners" at heart, and will join almost 
anything without inquiring very strictly into what the pro- 
posed organization is expected to accomplish, while of our 
constitutional non-joiners it may be said that the greater 
number, even of these, will join most things rather than be 



THE GANG 359 

left out. The belonging instinct is indeed preeminent in its 
power of standing alone, or nearly so, as the basis of a popu- 
lar amusement. 

An important result of its independence of specific pur- 
poses is that the gang, unlike the team, is permanent. Its 
continuance is not dependent upon the seasons or other ex- 
traneous conditions. Its members are members all the year 
round and often continue such for several years.^ 

1 The following from the opinion of Sir George Jessel, Master of the 
Rolls, in the case of Pooley vs. Driver, 5 Chancery Division, 458, is 
interesting as showing the transition in English law from trying to 
deal with a business partnership as made up of relations between in- 
dividuals to a frank recognition of the fact that it is a true entity of 
a very practical sort. 

" I am almost sorry that the word ' agency ' has been introduced 
into this judgment, because, of course, everybody knows that part- 
nership is a sort of agency, but a very peculiar one. You cannot 
grasp the notion of agency, properly speaking, unless you grasp the 
notion of the existence of the firm as a separate entity from the ex- 
istence of the partners ; a notion which was well grasped by the old 
Roman lawyers, and which was partly understood in the courts of 
equity before it was part of the whole law of the land, as it is now. 
But when you get that idea clearly, you will see at once what sort of 
agency it is. It is the one person acting on behalf of the firm. He 
does not act as agent, in the ordinary sense of the word, for the others 
so as to bind the others ; he acts on behalf of the firm of which they 
are members ; and as he binds the firm and acts on the part of the 
firm, he is properly treated as the agent of the firm. If you cannot 
grasp the notion of a separate entity for the firm, then you are re- 
duced to this, that inasmuch as he acts partly for himself and partly 
for the others, to the extent that he acts for the others he must be an 
agent, and in that way you get him to be an agent for the other part- 
ners, but only in that way, because you insist upon ignoring the ex- 
istence of the firm as a separate entity." 

A firm thus treated as an entity or a corporation created by statute 
is not a legal fiction but an existing fact which the law recognizes or 
sanctions. A fiction would be necessary in treating the matter in 
any other way. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE LAND OF THE LEAL 

It is clear from the above description of the gang that it is 
for boys the fullest natural expression of the great belonging 
instinct. As such it is normally not an evil but a good. 
Lawless as its manifestations often are, the thing itself is not 
lawless ; on the contrary it is, for boys of the age affected by 
it, like the self-assertion of the Big Injun age, the most lawful 
thing there is. The spirit of the gang indeed is more than 
lawful : it is the spirit of law itself. The instinct that sup- 
ports it is the instinct which all laws and all governments were 
intended to express and without which they could not exist. 

Aristotle says that man is by his nature a social animal, 
and he attributes the existence of human society directly to 
that fact. We make cities and states and nations not be- 
cause we find them useful in our business, not because they 
help us to accomplish our economic or other ulterior ends, 
but because we were born that way. Nature doubtless had 
her purpose in creating us with this desire — or to put it in 
current terms, our survival is no doubt due to this predilec- 
tion on our part — but, given human nature as it is, our 
motive for social action is not utilitarian. We combine in 
social units for the same reason that wolves do, or bees, or 
ants — because we are that kind of animal. And if we were 
not that kind of animal we could not so combine, however 
desirable it might be to do so. Giyen the power, and the 
resulting institutions, we do indeed promote and modify 

360 



THE LAND OF THE LEAL 361 

these for utilitarian reasons; and we often believe that 
these sensible second thoughts are our real motives for com- 
bining — just as the gang finds many wonderful excuses for 
its existence. But these are never the real motives. The 
instinct that makes all laws and social institutions is the 
same instinct that has made the gang. It is always in virtue 
of the belonging instinct that we belong. 

And without training in obedience to this instinct we could 
not belong effectively any more than we could become good 
artisans or good runners without permitting the chasing and 
creative instincts to train our legs and hands. If we would 
have our children full and useful members of society in any 
of its manifestations, we must permit them to take the pre- 
scribed course under this last and greatest of all the masters 
in nature's school. 

It may perhaps be said that we can procure this training 
in other ways than through developing the gang ; and it is 
in truth unnecessary to insist that all boys shall take the full 
course in gang membership in its most primitive form. The 
manifestations may be modified in various ways which we 
shall presently consider. But to do away with this primal 
expression of the belonging instinct altogether would be to 
cripple, at least in many boys, the power of membership by 
omitting from it a necessary stage of growth. The gang is 
not a chance phenomenon. It is nature's unit for the be- 
longing instinct during this period of its special vogue ; it is 
the branching off of membership in its new and accelerated 
development, the first bud of the state. As such its growth 
in some form is necessary to the best result. To arrive at 
nature's ends, you must follow nature's path. It may seem 
roundabout, and you may be tempted to lay out some cross- 
lots method that looks more direct ; but growth is a biologi- 
cal not an engineering problem, and growing things cannot 



362 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

be made to follow geometric laws. Belonging, to the boy, 
means as a rule belonging to the gang. The growth of the 
citizen in him is involved in the fortunes of this earliest 
shoot. 

Here again, as with the child finding its playground in the 
gutter and with the small boy seeking real achievement, we 
have so arranged it, especially in our cities, that this budding 
power, upon whose successful utterance healthy growth de- 
pends, shall search in vain for lawful methods of develop- 
ment, and shall be driven, in many cases, to choosing those 
which make of it a power for evil. One can hardly pick up 
a newspaper or a magazine without reading something of the 
terrible doings of the gang. We hear of it as a center of crim- 
inal association, and as developing into the unit of corrupt 
politics. There is frequent talk about breaking up the boys' 
gangs ; and sometimes the associations of a gang have got 
to be so bad that nothing but breaking it up can save its 
members. But it is a grave criticism upon the opportunity 
which we have given — or rather denied — to our bo}'S, that 
such instances should occur. I think there is some special 
judgment denounced against those who would turn the vital 
forces of the world into channels where their results are evil 
instead of good, pulling down instead of building up. This 
judgment our American cities have thoroughly merited, and 
it is now being meted out. 

The way to preserve the gang as a normal incarnation of 
the belonging instinct, and at the same time to avoid such 
manifestations of it as are incompatible with modern civiliza- 
tion, is obviously to provide opportunity and encouragement 
for those of its natural expressions that avoid this inconven- 
ience. The fighting impulse should find expression in the 
fighting games. For the raiding instinct there are the raid- 
ing games, now too much neglected, for which, in our crowded 



THE LAND OF THE LEAL 363 

cities, some substitute must if possible be found. Long 
walks, excursions, picnics, camping out, cross-country runs, 
making huts and hang-outs, tracking other boys and ani- 
mals; fishing, shooting, collecting, and photographing ex- 
peditions ; visits to strange scenes — including a reasonable 
allowance of danger, starvation, and fatigue — these and 
similarly appropriate and strenuous pursuits will meet a 
long felt want in any gang, and help materially in keeping it 
to lawful ways. Boys indeed are often surprised to find what 
a pace their elders can set for them and how satisfying to 
their moral requirements a perfectly innocent pursuit can be. 
The activities developed by the Boy Scouts can do much to 
fill in this gap. And when it has been filled, our suburban 
gardens and orchards, our prisons and police courts, the fruit 
dealer and the grocery man, will know the difference ; while 
mothers and fathers will see their boys, now going wrong 
from excess of the best qualities of boyhood, restored to 
decent and successful ways of life. 

To meet the hang-out instinct boys should be given the 
freedom of a shed or play room or an old attic ; and their 
taste in furnishing and ornamentation should be allowed to 
pass without comment or apparent observation. Respect 
your boys' secrets, and if you happen upon their rendezvous 
keep the matter to yourself. The fear of ridicule has prob- 
ably driven more boys to secrecy, and to doing things which 
they take care shall at all events be no laughing matter, 
than any other cause. 

Theatricals meet very accurately both the night-haunting 
proclivities and the imaginative leanings of the gang, and are 
often used with success in turning these to good account. 
There is a theatrical element — a half real, half symbolic 
quality — in a great part of gang activity which makes 
acting an instinctive method of expression. The gang, more 



364 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

than the individual at this period, retains reminiscences of 
the dramatic age. 

In general it should be said that this method, of develop- 
ing the spirit of membership by utilizing the gang itself as the 
natural unit of development, is not an easy one, although it is 
being successfully practiced by the Boy Scouts and by many 
of the small-sized boys' clubs and settlements. The soul 
of the gang is in its independence. Its aim is above all to be 
itself, the authentic outcome of the actual social spirit of its 
members, not the offspring of a foreign will. It is as wild as 
a pack of wolves and almost as hard to tame. And it cannot 
be caught by any lukewarm morality. Stories of the good 
boy who died, demands for the passive virtues of patience, 
resignation, blameless behavior, do not appeal to it. It is 
positive, masculine, demands rough work, will submit to no 
spirit less heroic than its own. Dr. Gulick has pointed out 
that the call most successful in bringing young men into the 
church has been the call for missionaries. They will not come 
purely to receive : but ask them to give, even their lives, 
and they recognize a demand that is worth attending to. 

In our praise of the gang impulse and of the team play that 
best embodies it, do not let us make the mistake of supposing 
that we can leave the training of the civic faculty to these 
alone. The gang contains the very substance of which citi- 
zenship is made, but it is the substance in its crude form. 
Its ethics are those of the war band, and need the correction 
of a wider loyalty. As between itself and all outsiders it has 
no sense of justice and inculcates none. The gang spirit, 
in short, besides being intensified, must be refined and very 
much enlarged. 

In this as in every other case of a passing expression of a 
great instinct, there is danger that adhesions shall be formed, 



I 



THE LAND OF THE LEAL 365 

that the early form shall survive its usefulness. We do not 
want middle-aged gangsters, nor perpetual ball players, any 
more than we want children to keep on through life making 
mud pies. The coming of the blossom involves the bursting 
of the bud. Our constant principle of timeliness implies 
not only beginning, but leaving off. 

The method of broadening the gang is by treating it as the 
gang itself has already treated the individual : by making it 
part of some more inclusive organization, subjecting it to 
the regulation and criticism of a larger whole. Boys' clubs 
are often built up upon this principle, making the gang rather 
than the individual boy the unit of organization, but bringing 
many gangs together into a larger loyalty. The school also 
may adopt the same procedure, recognizing existing gangs in 
its choice of teams, either for athletic or scholastic purposes. 
There is no conflict between the preservation of the small 
gang-sized unit and the development of the wider school or 
club loyalty. Belonging, in human beings, is not limited to 
one social body at a time ; on the contrary true membership 
in one unit often strengthens the power in regard to others. 
A man is not a worse citizen because he is a good father, nor 
does he love his country less in proportion as he loves his 
city more. Boys, it is true, during the special gang age are, 
if we might coin a word, monogangous; the specific gang 
impulse, like that of patriotism, monogamous marriage, or 
the homing instinct, seems to require one object and only 
one for its fulfillment. But though the boy has but one gang, 
his membership in that does not prevent his belonging to 
other more inclusive bodies. Gang members can be as pa- 
triotic, and can feel as strong a loyalty to their home or to 
their school, as anybody. And in general the relation of the 
smaller units of membership to the larger ones is that of mu- 
tual support rather than of antagonism. 



366 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

In a great degree the smaller unit is the matrix of the 
larger one : the school, the city, the nation are but the gang 
writ large. Having established the color — allowed the boy 
through the depth of his first instinctive belonging to know 
what it is to be true blue — we spread it over the wider area. 
And the gang spirit, or the belonging instinct back of it, is 
very susceptible of such development. The head of a boys' 
institution once said to me : " When they first come in here 
they steal /rom the institute; later they steal /or it." Once 
established, the sense of membership can be gradually wid- 
ened to include the larger whole. Boys readily feel that 
George Washington was playing the game and Benedict Ar- 
nold was not ; those in whom the germ has once got a foot- 
hold are good subjects for its further operation. But while 
the belonging instinct easily throws off these widening rings, 
the gang itself or some successor of it, some club or "goodly 
fellowship," some compact body of social equals, usually 
survives and, for reasons developed more fully in the next 
chapter, it is very desirable that it should do so. 

The effective way to develop school spirit, to make a school 
as distinguished from a place in which the children sit and 
study (or rest) certain hours out of every day, is practically 
the same as that by which the gang instinctively enhances 
its own existence. There should be school teams, not only 
in games but in science, art, debating, theatricals, and music. 
There should be glee clubs, mandolin and banjo clubs, a 
school orchestra, songs and plays written and rendered by the 
pupils, entertainments given by the school. There should be 
school occasions, a school birthday, or the birthday of its 
founder, who should be a sort of patron saint ; commence- 
ment exercises in which graduates come back and tell what 
they have done and become shining lights to illuminate for 
the present pupils the road ahead. There should be ritual, 



THE LAND OF THE LEAL 367 

such as the symbohc handing on of the flag from the graduat- 
ing class to the next in order. There should be a school 
emblem, a school color, a school song. The school should 
have its ancestors, the past heroes of its athletics with the 
appropriate myths of their superhuman deeds, its heroes 
of art and politics. It must have and celebrate a past, a pres- 
ent, and a future — cultivate tradition and aspiration, study 
the richest presentation of what it has done, what it hopes 
to do, and what it eternally is and means to be. These are 
of the very life of a school as of a true institution of any sort. 

Rhythm should not be forgotten as the great fusing power. 
It should be utilized not only in music and poetry performed 
by selected representatives, but in marching, congregational 
singing, perhaps some day in dancing, the original form of 
community expression. The school should be visualized in 
fit and dignified buildings, not crushing it down with a vast 
suggestion of expense, but embodying its use and purpose. 
School loyalty should be cultivated through definite services 
to the school. The smaller children should be encouraged 
to bring pictures and flowers and to take care of growing 
plants. Older children should be given responsibility in 
looking after the younger ones, coaching them in their games, 
inculcating a spirit of loyalty. Manual training should take 
so far as possible the direction of making things that will be 
used in the school and on the playground, though in a day 
school it would be impossible to reach the standard set by 
Hampton in this respect. 

The school cannot make use of the conspiring spirit of the 
gang. It cannot indulge in blood-curdling rites, both because 
the masters, who are members like the rest, would find it 
impossible to take these ceremonies seriously, and because 
the school, unlike the gang, has ceased to need for the pro- 
motion of its own self-consciousness that hostility to all 



368 . PLAY IN EDUCATION 

outsiders which these rites usually imply. On the contrary 
the pupils must be led on by masters and graduates to under- 
stand that other relations between groups are possible besides 
those of hostility. They might be told the story of Pasteur, 
whose strongest conscious motive in his eternal service to 
mankind seems to have been to get even with the Germans 
for Sedan. They should be led to feel, at all events, that 
competition is not necessarily internecine, that at bottom all 
loyal members of all organizations serve the same end, are 
children of the same ideal. The school must therefore in 
all practical ways suggest a wider loyalty. There should be 
athletic leagues in which several schools find a common in- 
terest in having the games fairly carried on. 

In general the boy's team sense should be taken at its most 
exalted moment, before it has hardened down into exclusive- 
ness or incapacity for generous appreciation of outsiders; 
and at this point there should be injected into it the idea that 
a narrow loyalty is disloyalty to the very spirit of which true 
loyalty consists — that taking the gang as final means dis- 
loyalty to the school ; that exclusive devotion to the school 
means disloyalty to the college, and that the graduates of a 
college who, when placed in responsible business office, give 
preference to their fellow-graduates, are disloyal not merely 
to their employer but to the college itself by identifying it 
with such disloyalty. In short, our boys and girls must be 
taught Mr. Royce's spirit of loyalty to loyalty, including that 
of your opponents. 

I wish we had the Scotch word leal — loyal and happy — the 
noblest word I think in any language. The Land o' the Leal, 
the true Valhalla, home of the happy warriors of all nations and 
of all faiths, the land where true foemen meet, and see that each 
was working for the one true cause : that is the heaven that is 
worth attaining, and such is the loyalty we must learn to teach. 



CHAPTER XLI 

THE GANG STANDARD 

The gang's independence of specific aims and purposes has 
one especially important result not noted in the last chapter. 
Membership independent of specific purpose becomes mem- 
bership for all purposes. The gang consciousness comes to 
be expressed not merely in this or that activity but in almost 
everything its members do. The boy carries his gang with 
him wherever he goes; it becomes a constant force and 
quality in him ; he is a Wharf Rat or a Ring Tailed Heeler in 
all relations. The gang in short does not merely prescribe 
action ; it confers status : it affects for each member not only 
what he does but what he is. 

It results that the gang has a great influence on individual 
conduct. The sort of influence varies much with different 
gangs ; it has nevertheless a general pretty well-defined di- 
rection. So far as individual relations, as distinguished from 
gang activities, are concerned, the gang takes over, practically 
entire, the ethical standards of the Big Injun age ; the new 
law is superimposed upon, but does not abrogate, the old. 
Indeed the desire for individual distinction characteristic of 
the earlier period becomes intensified ; the boy of fourteen 
is even more of a Big Injun than the boy of eight, although he 
is also something else. 

And the specific gang spirit, so far from discouraging the 

Big Injun tendencies, except where they come in conflict 

with its own purpose, adopts and sanctions them. In the 

execution of a gang maneuver the member must subordinate 

2 b 369 



370 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

his individual ambition to the common purpose ; but where 
there is no conflict the gang not only permits, but requires 
of him, that he shall seek personal distinction. It holds up 
an ideal not only of common but of individual achievement 
and requires obedience to it. As a boy who represents an 
organization in track athletics feels the two motives both 
together ; as he wants to win for Yale, and will go beyond 
himself — just that all important inch beyond what as an 
individual he could possibly accomplish — in his efforts to do 
honor to his college; so the gang's ideal for its members 
projects itself, in the imagination of each, beyond his indi- 
vidual outline, and under its requirement he adds a cubit to 
his height. 

And it is not merely in recognized team or gang contests 
that there occurs this transcendence of individual limitations. 
What "the crowd" expects will, in every direction, carry the 
member beyond the high-water mark of his individual achieve- 
ment. The Spartan is a Spartan for all purposes. He is 
Sparta incarnate : what he could never even aim at of his 
own initiative he will dare to satisfy her laws. 

It is characteristic of every gang to make this kind of 
demand upon the individual member. Such requirement 
is shown at the very outset in the conditions of entrance. 
Every gang, every college society — every human associa- 
tion — has some sort of initiation, conscious or unconscious, 
to see whether the neophyte measures up. The standard 
in a boys' gang, like its external politics, has largely to do 
with fighting ; only here it is single combat that is in ques- 
tion. The dueling instinct is older than society, and in 
each generation of boys antedates the gang; but the gang 
instinct takes it up, standardizes it, and adds its own pecul- 
iar sanction. Fighting is a common test for admission to 



THE GANG STANDARD 371 

the gang as it is to good society everywhere, from the head 
hunters to the aristocratic circles of every age and country. 
The obhgation upon the boy to fight upon due occasion and 
to hold his own in the hundred forms of individual com- 
petition is owed not merely to himself but to the gang. He 
must in this as in every other respect uphold its colors. 
And he usually finds he can do so, as many a man will do 
things for the honor of his cloth which he could never have 
gone through by the power of his individual morality. 
Fighting is a characteristic requirement, but not the only 
one. The law of the whole as it lives in each member implies 
a general obligation to make good. 

What may be the cause of this gang law, applying to the 
individual conduct of its members unconnected with the 
gang activities, is an interesting but not a practically im- 
portant speculation. Shore birds (perhaps all birds that 
go in flocks) will kill a wounded mate. I suppose the reason 
is that the flock can fly no faster than its weakest member, 
and that the same instinct which forbids the abandonment 
of the living comrade prescribes his sacrifice. So the gang 
asks, " Are you up to our requirements ; can you row your 
weight ; or will you be a drag upon the rest ? " And though 
it does not kill, it accomplishes the same object by exclusion 
of those whose answer must be negative. 

At all events, whatever the reason of its existence, this 
standard setting by the gang, the impinging of its law upon 
its members in their individual affairs, is I believe the strong- 
est moral force that applies to youth. That it is not always 
a force for good gives rise to a social problem of the first 
magnitude which we must presently consider. But that it 
is a great power for good or evil I think no one will deny. 

One reason for the ability of the gang to enforce its stand- 



372 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

ard is that it has the courage of its convictions. It will go 
all lengths. It is the only educational institution that is 
not afraid. Intra-gang discipline is very strict in its punish- 
ment of disloyalty ; but its positive spirit is its great quality. 
It carries its members with it whether for good or evil. 
St. Augustine concludes that he would never have stolen 
those pears if the other fellows had not said: "Come on." 
If the gang standard demands fighting, its members fight; 
if it requires stealing, they steal ; if breaking and entering 
is a part of the curriculum, that also is forthcoming. 

And the end so emulously sought is never wholly evil. 
The true end, indeed, is never really so, however mistaken 
or even criminal the means. The gang, every gang, however 
uncouth its outward manifestations, is always idealist at 
heart. Through good repute and ill repute, in all its dim 
gropings for expression, it is ruled by an incorrigible idealism, 
by a dreamer's faith that somehow, somewhere, against all 
appearances, its ideals are true and bound to triumph, and 
that any sacrifice to them must be worth while. 

The gang is the normal source of heroic standards among 
young men. Its value in this respect is recognized, appar- 
ently, in English boarding schools, which seem to rely upon 
a set of bigger boys for the most important part of school 
government, namely, the maintenance of standards of man- 
ners and conduct. The war band of the ancient Germans, 
the "Young Men" among our own Indians, are the origina- 
tors of bold adventure and heroic counsel, as are the well- 
named scholoB, clubs of warriors, in every time and nation, 
from the hetaireiai of the Greeks, the peers of Charlemagne, 
and their predecessors the "companions" of the German 
war kings, to the bands of minute men of Massachusetts 
(one of which still survives in the Concord "Circle" to which 
Emerson belonged) and the young officers' clubs of the pres- 



THE GANG STANDARD 373 

ent day. The cadets of West Point and Annapolis, with 
their fighting customs, and the German duehng societies 
are not so crazy as people think. 

Boys do not join the gang for the sake of pleasure or self- 
indulgence. It is true they sometimes think they do. You 
have to state to yourself some object for your endeavors, 
and if raiding apple stands is the most eligible occupation 
that presents itself, you doubtless assume that it is for the 
sake of the apples that the enterprise is carried on. But 
it is never really so. To cite St. Augustine again, he finds 
that it was not the pears that attracted him but the sheer 
love of stealing — " and if they did taste good it was the 
sweetness of stolen fruit." So far as there is any motive 
in belonging to the gang beyond the direct satisfaction of 
the belonging instinct and of the fighting, raiding, and 
other achieving instincts represented in its activities, it is, as 
often as anything else, the desire for hardness, for doing 
difficult things and being made to do them, the desire for 
emancipation of the spirit through daring. The boy may be 
a coward in his heart, but his instinct of the moral necessity 
of being otherwise will make him seek the gang, with its 
inexorable standard, and raise himself to its requirements. 
It is because its standard is inexorable, more uncompromising 
than any discoverable among adults, that it holds dominion 
over him. The Knights of the Round Table were — apart 
from their excessive devotion to distressed damsels — the ideal 
gang, the one which each actual example tends to become. 
Courage, adventure, loyalty, are its fundamental motives. 

They reckon ill who leave me out : to ignore the instinctive 
form both of their heroism and of their loyalty is to give up 
the moral education of our boys. Much as the gang has 
done for evil, its essential spirit is, for boys between twelve 
and sixteen, the most powerful influence for good. 



374 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

This function of the gang as a school of individual heroism 
is a reason, in addition to its importance as the germ of 
citizenship, for its retention in our educational system. It 
needs to be widened and refined, but its spirit of intense all- 
round membership, with the resulting concrete standard 
of individual conduct, must be preserved. The gang spirit 
must be spread out but not diluted : the sort of close fel- 
lowship it represents is needed as a school of conduct. Young 
people are not all heroic. No people, young or old, are 
capable of evolving their own standards of behavior. We 
all need outside pressure of a fierce and inexorable sort to 
overcome our laziness or cowardice, make us face the lion 
in the path, strike out into the cold world upon the quest 
our soul demands of us. Hunger is good, but an exacting 
social standard — searching, concrete, unescapable — such 
as some form of gang alone supplies, is better still. Re- 
member again the dog who climbed the tree, not because he 
could, but because the catamount was after him and he had 
to. We are all of us that kind of dog. 

Manners especially are a social product. Good manners 
are the most important of our institutions. The most 
difficult problem of life is to find the right way of treating 
other people — to make courtesy coincide with independence, 
respect for others with entire self-respect. Actual good 
manners constitute the rarest of accomplishments and the 
most respected, whether in a palace, a wigwam, or a corner 
grocery. They are the most authentic credential and best 
achievement of our heroes. But even heroic genius will 
hardly hit upon a whole code by itself alone. And, if it 
should, the message will not in such case be transmitted, for 
lack of any public to receive it. 

Good manners and good mores, actual habits of behavior 
befitting human dignity, consonant with the higher human 



THE GANG STANDARD 375 

needs, — these are our most precious social heritage ; and 
the most important business of social institutions is to see 
that their tradition is passed on. Success in this all-impor- 
tant function requires a social medium tense enough to 
receive and to transmit the heroic conception of behavior 
as it is gradually evolved. Precept in this all-important 
department is of negligible value. Not what he is told to 
do, but what he sees done and what he finds required of 
him by a body of opinion whose pressure he cannot escape, 
is the force that molds a young person's standard of be- 
havior. 

And the standard must be concrete. The type set up 
must be defined to a degree beyond the scope of any possible 
description. Behavior is not a science but an art. There 
are a hundred matters of conduct in which some particular 
way must be found, although no way is demonstrably best. 
I am not arguing for pedantry or the rule of the martinet ; as 
often as not the heroic fashion will be that of rebellion against 
existing formulas. But yet there must be some element 
of fashion, some conventional requirements. Young people 
should not be thrown into the world with nothing between 
them and its infinite and perplexing problems but the Golden 
Rule and the injunction to be good. There must be definite 
ways, prescribed or understood, in which courage shall be 
demonstrated, definite forms of heroic behavior required, 
specific ways of expressing scorn of danger, of bribes, cajol- 
eries, of showing a readiness to act as the spirit wills. It is 
all the better perhaps if the heroic soul rebels against the 
prescribed way and shows a better one ; but there must even 
in that case be a way to rebel against, while for the average 
unheroic person a definite standard and an inexorable social 
pressure to its attainment is a needed help. Children, 
though not born heroes as a rule, are fortunately all born 



376 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

susceptible to heroic example, and they should be brought 
together in association close enough to allow the heroes 
among them, and the hero in each when he dares declare 
himself, to make their example binding. 

When the young savage is required to demonstrate his 
proficiency as a hunter and fighter before he is allowed to 
marry, the educational effect must be very different from 
that of a general precept to "be brave and skillful." Civi- 
lized nations have preserved something of the wholesome 
savage custom. The young Athenian had to meet definite 
physical and moral requirements before he was named a 
"man." Rome made similar conditions to putting on the 
toga. There is some reminiscence of such even at the pres- 
ent day. 

But the important part of such requirements must always 
be unwritten. The ideal of the gentleman, especially as 
held in aristocratic societies, is an example of what I mean. 
There has been built up around this word a concrete, almost 
visible, ideal of character, carried far beyond what can be 
reasoned out from any conscious principles, the composite 
portrait of a gentleman, to which a thousand forgotten heroes 
have added each a trait. The creation of this ideal has been 
in my opinion the greatest achievement of the English race. 
It is an epic achievement, a work embodying the moral 
genius of a great people, a poem to be felt, not read, more 
active in the heart of youth than any reading of Homer could 
ever make his heroes. It is a conception concrete yet open 
to an infinite projection. In some respects, it is true, the 
ideal of the gentleman is not only beyond our conscious 
principles but is opposed to them, as in the place it assigns 
to women, treating them not humanly as they are, but as 
the male imagination of some centuries back required them 
to be. And yet because of its beauty and its definiteness 



1 



THE GANG STANDARD 377 

it is, though partly obsolete, superior to any other we pos- 
sess. A boy can still be brought up as a gentleman because 
there is an established standard of what the word means, 
— a standard that can be definitely presented, for which 
no substitute has yet been found. 

A similar result has been achieved by the Samurai of 
Japan. All aristocracies have had something of the same 
effect down to the days of ''good society" itself. And 
almost all have stood for some form of the code duello, the 
first item in the individual ethics of the gang. We would 
not perpetuate false ideals of caste, but we must preserve 
in some form that compactness of social structure, capable 
of receiving and transmitting definite standards of behavior, 
on which the influence of caste depends, and without sub- 
jection to which the child is denied the most important ele- 
ment in education. 

The lack of definite social pressure is the weakest point in 
our present civilization. With the primitive but definite 
ideals of barbarian society something very precious has 
been lost. Darwin said that the wild cowboy Spaniards of 
the east coast of South America were gentlemen, while 
their more civilized cousins of the west coast were not. Sir 
Walter Scott makes a similarly unfavorable comparison of 
the civilized burgher of Glasgow with the wild cataran of 
the Highland hills. Comparisons to the same effect are often 
drawn between the manners of barbarians like the Bedouin 
Arabs or our own Indians and those of more civilized peoples. 
And after making every allowance for aristocratic prejudice 
in favor of the more barbaric virtues, there is enough of truth 
in these opinions to be worth thinking of. Certainly it 
will not profit us to gain the whole world of material pros- 
perity if the result in human character turns out a loss. 

It is for the sake of compactness of membership and re- 



378 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

suiting concreteness of ideal that all dogma, all intolerance 
exists. We are apt in these days to be intolerant of intol- 
erance; and surely our revolt was needed in view of the 
hideous cruelty and stupidity of the old regime, of the 
depths of baseness and inhumanity to which the chivalric 
mind showed itself able to descend. But we are mistaken 
if we think that we, or any society, can live or be worth 
preserving without affirming, and insisting upon, many things 
the truth or value of which has not been demonstrated. 
The conduct of life cannot wait upon scientific demonstra- 
tion. No city, nation, society of any sort, will ever gain 
or preserve its life that will not take risks — affirm, and 
gladly die for, things that never can be proved. 

It may seem that I have arrived at a paradoxical con- 
clusion in thus affirming in substance that the gang must be 
preserved as a school of manners. Good manners in the 
ordinary sense are certainly not among its salient charac- 
teristics. But consult any drama, novel, myth, or other 
illustration of what has been deemed heroic character, and 
you will see that what is most respected in this world is in 
the last analysis that very scorn of pain and danger which, 
in a higher degree than any other institution, the gang 
requires in its members. The German upper classes send 
their sons to Heidelberg "to learn manners." And the 
manners of Heidelberg are prescribed by the student dueling 
clubs. They may not be the best sort of manners, but 
they include the hard part; and above all they are really 
taught. 

The gang of course must be corrected, led, set right on 
many matters. But it must not be denatured. We need 
for our salvation the compelling influence of such an insti- 
tution, with its definite standard and its stern transmission 



THE GANG STANDARD 379 

of it. Man, in morals as in war and industrial pursuits, 
advances not alone, but by group units. The self-relying 
hero, it is true, has his essential function as standard-setter, 
moral pioneer, but the compact group vibrant to his example 
is essential even to the hero's fulfillment of his function. 
It is the soil in which heroic acts take root. 



CHAPTER XLII 

THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 

The gang tendency of the belonging instinct crops out 
as gang, as team, club, troup, chorus or study group, and 
in many other forms. It may, as has been stated, easily 
be widened to include the school or playground, and there 
are many other organizations which young people will join 
in the early exuberance of this instinct, some not so valuable 
as others — some, like most high school fraternities, in 
which exclusion of outsiders rather than the belonging of 
the members is the chief attraction, requiring positive dis- 
couragement. 

But there are certain units of membership appearing later 
than the gang and school which seem to be in our blood, 
which we certainly take to with especial readiness, and 
which should be encouraged both as normal expansions of 
human personality and as practical social appliances which 
we cannot well get along without ; namely, the profession, 
the nation, the local political unit, and the neighborhood. 
These institutions should be made to grow in all of us both 
because we need them in our business and because, like the 
home, the gang, or the team, they are almost as much a 
part of us as the hand or tool. They fill out the form of 
our inherited spiritual body ; their omission implies stunting 
and deformity. 

Of all these social units the neighborhood is perhaps 
the most important in its educational effect because its 
influence is especially concrete. Neighborhood opinion 

380 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 381 

has in it a compelling qnality that is lacking in the larger 
units, and applies to matters of everyday morals and be- 
havior which these can never reach. 

And the neighborhood is peculiarly in need of cultiva- 
tion at the present time because it is that one of the concen- 
tric circles of human personality that is in danger of dropping 
out if conscious and effective means are not presently taken 
for its preservation. 

The danger, like so many others that threaten our social 
life, arises from the crowding of our cities and the corre- 
sponding loneliness of our country districts, due to the great 
improvements in the art of agriculture. Country people 
now^ live so far apart that they cannot meet, and city people 
so near together that they cannot breathe. The former diffi- 
culty is being partly overcome by our modern space-anni- 
hilating contrivances; the latter is more stubborn and is 
reenforced by the absence of common interests and insti- 
tutions. 

A patch of city is not a political or industrial unit, and it 
is very difficult to build up in it a social life of any sort. 
Its institutions are not its own but those of the larger whole 
of which it is not a member, but merely a geographic sec- 
tion. The citizen's real associates may live two miles off, 
while he and his next neighbor never meet. Even the 
lodger on the next floor may marry, die, or move away, 
and the city dweller never be the wiser. If indeed he has 
real neighbors, even at a distance, the lack of local ties may 
be to a considerable extent made up. The social set, if he 
belongs to one, may replace the neighborhood, and in this 
matter of forming congenial alliances the city has a superior- 
ity in the larger choice it offers. Still, the real neighbor- 
hood has two great advantages: first that, as Chesterton 
says of the family, it includes all sorts of people, so that its 



382 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

members have to put up with human nature in its nor- 
mal variety ; and secondly, that nobody, whether he wants 
to or not, gets quite left out. The danger, often realized. 
is that the city dweller may have no neighbors, or at least 
no neighborhood — no group of any sort in which he feels 
a membership — no immediate social atmosphere, no stand- 
ard which holds him up and which he feels it his business 
to uphold. He easily becomes the man without a neighbor, 
almost as maimed a creature as the man without a country 
or the man without a home. 

The loss of active participation in neighborhood affairs 
is the loss of what is in grown-up life the first, most inti- 
mate and concrete form of patriotism. The civic loyalties 
of the neighborless man are starved at the root for lack 
of content. To be a full-power citizen you must have 
worried about the condition of your own street, your local 
school, your particular branch of the sewer system. You 
must have joined with your neighbors in impassioned pro- 
test on the subject of garbage removal and fought against 
them for the suppression of their favorite nuisance. It is 
these direct experiences of the daily humble service of the 
working citizen that give perspective to your views on such 
comparatively simple matters as the tariflF, the regulation of 
the trusts, and foreign war. 

But the greatest injury to the individual from the atro- 
phy of the neighborhood in modern life is through the loss 
of its reflex effect upon his own morality. Plato questions 
how far any man could be trusted if he were invisible. 
Such is precisely the case of the man without a neighbor- 
hood. He is to all intents and purposes invisible so far as 
effective check upon his conduct is concerned. Nobody 
sees him whom he need ever see again or whose opinion 
he has any motive to conciliate. The people of his own 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 383 

street need know nothing of his hfe. There is nobody to 
whom he must give an account of himself or present a definite 
and comprehensible personality, no public opinion to which 
he is effectively amenable. Hawthorne, describing his 
consular experiences at Liverpool, gives an instance which 
he says is typical of many, of a respectable citizen going 
morally to pieces upon finding himself for the first time 
alone in a foreign city. It may be said that such a man, 
like Bernard Shaw's middle class English people, has had 
too much of the neighborhood, has relied upon the harness 
to hold him up, and acquired only respectability, not life 
or character. If so, the real trouble was that the neighbor- 
hood itself had gone to sleep for lack of membership, in its 
turn, in a larger and more stimulating whole. Indeed, 
Shaw himself says that the trouble with respectable people 
is their leading too private a life in too small a circle. 

In any case it remains the fact that we all of us need 
a concrete social requirement to hold us up to the mark, to 
remind us even of our own ideals and help us to live up to 
them. 

The neighborhood unit is so deep in us, has had so large 
a part in the conditions under which our social instinct took 
form, that we cannot live successfully without it. The life 
of our ancestors for many thousand years, which molded 
their character and traditions, was lived in villages. From 
the days of Tacitus and beyond, the village community 
was, next to the family, the social unit of the Germanic 
peoples — and of the other races also for that matter. The 
old life was fairly reproduced in the English village, with 
its close neighborhood, its common land, its village green, 
which in its turn was transplanted without material change, 
so far as neighborhood influences are concerned, to this 
country. The village community was the crucible of the 



384 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

race, the soil in which it grew, its nest, its natural habitat, 
its second home, to which its social mind has reference. 
Our social tentacles feel about for it and can close so contentedly 
on nothing else. Some anthropologists indeed believe that 
the horde — the ancestor of the village in its earlier migratory 
stage before, like a barnacle, it attached itself to a partic- 
ular locality — is older than the family itself. 

As to the method of cultivating the neighborhood and the 
other normal units of membership in the child, it will in- 
clude the means already described as appropriate to the 
school. But to each particular unit certain methods are 
especially appropriate. The neighborhood is peculiarly 
susceptible of expression in the form of play. The village 
green must have had a good share in its original creation, 
and in essentials the village green, even in our cities, can be 
revived — indeed, if we use all the resources at our command, 
it can in some essential aspects be surpassed. 

Play should accordingly often take forms that represent 
the neighborhood and receive neighborhood recognition. 
There should be neighborhood ball teams, neighborhood 
dances, concerts, plays, entertainments. Dramatics are 
an especially valuable and effective form of neighborhood 
occasion. Neighbors I have reason to believe can get to- 
gether even on a sand beach to dance, play games, and gen- 
erally to disport themselves on moonlight nights, regardless 
of age and apparent social or physical incapacity — even 
of such discouragements as the increasing depth and wetness 
of the sand and inability to hear the distant sorely thumped 
piano. Come let us play with our neighbors should be added 
to Froebel's famous exhortation concerning our children. 

The school is already becoming, and will become still 
more, the center of neighborhood revival, and will thus re- 
store for its children the lost unit of membership, the social 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 385 

setting in which they can best grow, the all-embracing, 
definite, and conscious social standard, the lack of which 
is their present greatest educational disadvantage. 

The battle with the slum is not primarily a battle against 
the obvious evils of drink, overcrowding, immorality, and 
bad sanitary arrangements. These are the evidences that 
the slum exists. The thing itself is not a positive but a 
negative phenomenon. The slum is what is left when from 
an aggregate of people living together you subtract the local 
personality. It is the body of a dead neighborhood, and 
what happens to it is simply the normal result of death in 
any organism. Every social environment that is not a 
neighborhood is essentially a slum. Its consistency has 
become that of the shifting soil of the desert. It is here 
that the school may act as the pioneer plant, the broom 
or scrub pine that sends its roots out through the shifting 
mass and gives it its first coherence, making it in time a 
true soil in which other things can grow. 

Next to the neighborhood the trade is the unit of mem- 
bership most neglected in oiu" modern life. The guild, 
artel, brotherhood of workers in the same calling, was an 
early creation of the belonging instinct, and one of great 
importance. With its professional ideal of workmanship, 
making the honor of the calling, not the market alone, the 
standard, it stood for the artistic element in useful work. 
It represents the play standard, the ideal of beauty and 
craftsmanship, the elements of rhythm and creation, as su- 
perior to the hunger or purely bread-and-butter motive. 

And the guild has stood for making good also. It has 
especially insisted upon the public nature of true work. 
The guild brother was, as such, a citizen, and recognized 
the civic responsibility of his calling. He stuck to his last 
not, as Plato advises, because he was merely a workman 
2c 



386 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

and had nothing to do with pubhc matters, but because for 
the very reason that he was a workman he exercised a pubhc 
function and had a duty to his fellow citizens. It was no 
accident that the guilds played a great part in the political 
as well as the artistic life of the free cities out of which our 
modern democracy has grown. 

The sort of place occupied by the guilds is taken by our 
professional organizations of the present day. Our lawyers' 
and doctors' associations, in upholding the scientific 
standard of their respective callings, attacking abuses of 
practice, appearing before legislative committees to advo- 
cate laws simplifying legal machinery or curtailing the ac- 
tivities of the microbe, — thus cutting off their own means 
of subsistence, — persisting in this course in spite of public 
misunderstanding and the attacks of the less scrupulous 
members of their own professions and others interested in 
the perpetuation of the evils aimed at, show themselves 
true public servants and true professionals who realize for 
us to-day the higher attributes of calling. 

Trade unions take a different place. Occupied primarily 
with the relation of the worker not to his work but to his 
employer, they represent an economic rather than a profes- 
sional interest. A professional standard is not, however, 
wholly absent from their intention, and may become more 
prominent as time goes on, although there is, in the absence 
from our modern callings of artistic or scientific expres- 
sion, a permanent obstacle to such development. 

Vocation may become a solid ground of membership in 
a different way, namely, through cooperation. Sir Horace 
Plunkett, who has been the most successful social architect 
of our time, has encouraged industrial and financial coopera- 
tion among the peasantry of Ireland largely as a means 
toward a better social and political cooperation, and has 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 387 

advised a similar beginning as a means of overcoming the 
extreme individualism which is the chief barrier to social 
progress among our own country people in America. The 
future of cooperation is indeed the future of industrial 
membership, of true concrete socialism. 

Coming now to the units of political membership : the 
town or city, the county, and the state are the most important 
as organs of internal policy, the nation as embodying rela- 
tions to the world outside. The town, as the descendant 
of the ancient village community, the county, and the na- 
tion have deep historic roots which however it is the province 
rather of the sociologist than of the educator to trace. 

The method of cultivating the town, city, county, state, 
and nation as living personalities in the child's heart is 
largely a matter of precipitating existing sentiment in the 
form of clear conception and definite resolve. Political 
ideals easily become abstract. What is needed is to teach 
concrete ideas of service, to give the child a notion of just 
where he fits. Many children leave school with the idea 
that they would like to die for their country, and with a 
real readiness to do so, who yet exemplify their patriotism 
only by trying to live at its expense. 

One thing we can do is to inculcate the idea that in the 
city or nation, as in every other team, the first duty of the 
member is to hold up his end. Support yourself, and your 
family when you have one, pull your weight, do in the first 
place your daily humdrum work ; this is a part of your serv- 
ice to the state, indeed the most essential part. Here 
we come again across the guild idea. Dr. Kirschensteiner 
of Munich, the distinguished exponent of the value of con- 
tinuation schools, writes that their best effect is in teaching 
patriotism; "Do it for Germany, do good work in order 
that German goods may be the best and that the Father- 



388 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

land may prosper" is their most important lesson. It is 
this sort of teaching that makes patriotism concrete, pro- 
duces real citizens, brings to its full life in the child this 
most important form of membership. 

Of course the concrete duties of citizenship in the narrower 
sense should also be taught in school, especially in the higher 
grades in connection with the study of history and of the 
methods of government and public action. Something is 
accomplished by showing the child just what his civic duties 
are going to be so that his patriotic intention may learn 
early to close upon them and not evaporate in noble senti- 
ment. Royce's question "When were you patriotic?" 
is worth suggesting. 

But in developing political membership in children the 
appeal to the imagination is always the important method. 
Every means should be taken of making vivid the city, 
state, and nation as living beings. Our children should 
feel, like the citizen of Florence, the beat of "the grand heart 
of the commune." We should present to them ]\Iilton's 
vision of the commonwealth as "a huge Christian person- 
ality as compact of virtue as a body, the growth and stature 
of an honest man." 

To this end we must make much use of symbols. Flag 
worship may be overdone, but it is founded on a true psy- 
chology. Children must know our shrines and sacred 
places, our Old South, Old State House, Faneuil Hall; 
our Valley Forge, Mount Vernon, Concord Bridge ; if not 
by visits, then by descriptions, colored prints, and photo- 
graphs. 

We must preserve and dignify our monuments, erect 
our public buildings in a spirit of reverence for the common- 
wealth for whose perfection we travail, however feebly and 
imperfectly, as the civic and religious associations of the 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 389 

Middle Ages labored at the cathedrals that have ennobled 
their cities for all time. The child should be helped to carry 
his city and his country with him in imagination, and these 
should be made capable of visualization, for this reason. 
The Swiss are the proverbially homesick people because 
their country has more feature than another. There is 
more of it in the memory to be missed. It was not for noth- 
ing that Athens had her Acropolis and her Long Walls, with 
Parnassus behind and the opalescent ^Egean, "the wine- 
colored sea," in front. The Athenian wherever he went 
could see his beloved city in his mind's eye, and showed his 
gratitude by adorning it as no piece of the earth's surface 
has been adorned before or since. St. Paul's, Westminster, 
the Tower, London Bridge, have done much to create Lon- 
don and hold it together in spite of its bewildering political 
confusion and enormous size. English authors who like 
Dickens have knov\'n and described their city with familiar 
affection have added greatly to its personality. The local 
political unit should for this reason be of convenient visualiz- 
ing size. The county will never be as well governed as the 
town because it can never be so well imagined. A state or 
nation is a different case, because there we frankly resort to 
symbolism, and because what is lost in handiness of size 
is gained in majesty. We see the nation as the largest 
extension of ourself, the final apotheosis of the gang against 
the background of an outside and partly alien world. 

City and nation must be embodied, and their ideal exten- 
sion illustrated, in human personality. Every city of Greece 
had its figure of the Kore or virgin — her Parthenon, or 
virgin's temple, being Athens' contribution to this cult — 
and its divine protector. The temple of Poseidon stand- 
ing alone amid the grass and brambles still tells what the 
city of Psestum meant to its busy throngs. And every old 



390 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

town in Europe has its Madonna or its patron saint — the 
latter often being its ancient bishop beloved for his local 
patriotism. We do well to tell our children the stories 
of those heroes in whom the country has reached its 
fullest incarnation, touched its present high-water mark 
in courage, dignity, humanity. America's greatest assimi- 
lative power to-day is the great heart of Lincoln. In him 
the poorest immigrant, the smallest child, feels something 
of what our country longs to be. 

And we must make as vivid as we can those times, as in 
the revolt of the colonies, the winning of the West, the up- 
rising of the North, in which the Nation itself emerges, 
and walks the earth almost as a visible personality. 

We form the city, state, and nation in the child's mind 
as we form the school, as the gang instinctively learns to form 
itself — by symbol, story, song, and prophecy — by making 
real its past and future and its living present. 

This making the political unit live in the child's heart 
is important not purely that the child may help to make a 
great nation, but also that the working within him of a 
great nation may make the child. For, more than all other 
educational influences, it is in truth the nation tliat makes 
the citizen. His country is the tree on which he grows. 
Its living demand upon him is the most important non- 
hereditary element in character. When Mutius Scaevola 
burnt his hand off in the flame, it was Rome in him giving 
her answer to the foreign king who thought to frighten her. 
Athens made the x\thenians. She demanded heroes, poets, 
sculptors, men of genius; she yearned and travailed for 
these, required them to fulfill her purposes, dreamed before- 
hand the things they were to do. They rounded out the 
body which her soul implied. She was afire with the beauty 



THE LARGER UNITS OF MEMBERSHIP 391 

and wonder of the universe ; and within her four walls no 
citizen escaped the flame. Phidias, Plato, Sophocles, are 
voices of a civic personality the most intense the world has 
ever seen. 

And to ennoble the child the city, the nation, must itself 
be noble. Its spirit must be such as, living in his heart, 
w^ill require nobility of him. It is to the ennobling of the 
state in all its manifestations that we, the citizens of to-day, 
should consecrate our lives. 

These various memberships and the others in home, gang, 
school, that we have previously spoken of are not extras 
in human life, but belong to its very substance. They are 
the threads upon which human character is strung, — the 
braces, the stays, or rather the roots running out in different 
directions and keeping the individual's personality in place. 
It is by preparation for taking their part in these that we 
can best insure for our children continued life and growth. 



I 



CHAPTER XLIII 

GIRLS 

Up to the age of loyalty what I have said about the play 
of children applies to boys and girls pretty much alike. 
During the dramatic age girls care more for dolls and boys 
more for soldiers — and this not wholly because in our 
treatment of each we assume that such will be their prefer- 
ence. Of girls during the Big Injun age it may be said that 
they are less so. There is of course great variety among both 
boys and girls in their presentation of the characteristics 
of this strenuous period ; but on the average the girls repre- 
sent a milder case. 

The great practical conclusion of those who have made 
the best study of girls during the Big Injun age is that it is 
best they should have it thoroughly. Every girl should 
play with boys and should be encouraged to be as much of 
a boy as possible. She should learn to give and take, to 
accept defeat and hard knocks without crying or having 
her feelings hurt or becoming tragic over it. She should 
even carry the experience of the Big Injun age so far as to 
acquire a rudimentary sense of justice, a quality not neces- 
sarily detracting from the eternal feminine. In short, a 
girl should be a tomboy during the tomboy age, and the 
more of a tomboy she is, the better. From eight to thirteen 
is indeed, according to the best authorities, the critical age 
with girls, and not, as is generally supposed, the period of 
the early teens ; because it is during the earlier period that 
the issues of tlie later one are practically decided. If a 

392 



GIRLS 393 

girl does not become a good sport before she is fourteen, 
she never will, but will be condemned to premature young- 
ladyhood. She ought, indeed, to secure the best results, 
to be caught somewhere about the age of eight, or ten at 
the latest. Of course we must, here again, beware of ad- 
hesions to a passing phase. It is not a perpetual tomboy 
we are trying to produce, but the enduring values that are 
to be acquired during tliat period. 

The athletic capacity of girls under fourteen is in most 
directions about equal to that of boys. At the age of twelve 
or thirteen they can usually beat boys of the same age, 
particularly in the running games. Pole vaulting, throwing 
or handhng heavy weights, races longer than a hundred 
yards, have been classed by good authorities as bad for 
little girls, basket ball and field hockey as doubtful. But 
with caution in regard to these forms of exercise there is 
not much that boys do that is not good for girls also at this 
period. Especially appropriate are the running games, 
both of the chasing class like tag, hill dill, prisoners' base, 
and of the more developed hunting and stalking variety 
like I spy and white men and Indians. It is in the short 
runs especially that girls show their athletic superiority, 
but games are better and safer than track athletics. Base- 
ball is a good game for girls. They are said to lack the 
boy's throwing instinct, but it requires a professional to 
know the difference ; certainly some girls can throw farther 
than most boys. Climbing is good, and Dr. Sargent has 
pointed out that women do at least as well as men in pro- 
fessional gymnastics ; both in truth are descended from the 
same family tree and show an instinctive reminiscence of it. 
Girls certainly take more than boys do to the skipping games, 
such as jump rope and hop scotch, which seem to form a 
sort of instinctive preparatory course for dancing. 



394 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Girls up to thirteen or fourteen are much hke boys ; but 
then there comes a parting of the ways. Just when the 
boys take their great start toward becoming men, girls take 
an equally definite turn toward womanhood. The boy of 
sixteen is in every form of athletic ability vastly ahead 
of his Big Injun younger brother; he is already a man 
while the other is still a boy. In the same way the girl of 
sixteen is a woman while her sister of thirteen is still a child ; 
but in athletic ability her sister is as likely as not ahead of 
her./^ People who have to do with girls of this age, especially 
during the years from fourteen to sixteen, often complain 
that they take no interest in anything active, in remarkable 
contrast with their brothers, who at the same period can 
take no serious interest in anything else. The girl's develop- 
ment, whatever else may be true of it, is evidently not to 
be, to an extent at all comparable with that of boys, through 
participation in strenuous athletic games. Some forms of 
athletics indeed are especially injurious to her. It seems 
to be true that extreme competition, whether in basket 
ball or other strenuous forms of athletics, is in this class. 

On the other hand it is a mistake to suppose that a girl 
of fourteen should suddenly give up all athletic sports and 
be relegated to a purely stationary existence with no outlet 
for emotion, and no means of growth except of a sedentary 
sort. There still survives in her something of the Big Injun 
spirit of competition, though in a less extreme degree than 
in her brother, and there are many ways in which it can be 
beneficially indulged. 

Ball games especially seem to agree with girls, if indeed 
they did not originate with them. Nausikaa, it will be 
remembered, was a ball player, and Atalanta was so ad- 
dicted to that form of sport that she lost her most famous 
race through her instinct to follow the ball. Newell tells 



GIRLS 395 

us in his "Games and Songs of American Children" that 
ball was regarded among the Romans as especially a woman's 
game and that during the Middle Ages it is mentioned as 
such by Walther von der Vogelweide. Baseball itself is 
given by Miss Austen in " Northanger Abbey " as a favorite 
recreation of her heroine. It is, to be sure, the less serious, 
more romping, sort of ball games that appeal most to the 
majority of girls when left to their own instincts. Baseball, 
not quite at its most intense ; its reincarnation in the earlier, 
less scientific but livelier form of what is beginning to be 
called "squash ball" (originally rounders); tennis, shinny, 
volley ball ; basket ball (women's rules), the players being 
duly examined and carefully watched, are good games 
for this age. So are all the running games in which com- 
petition has not acquired the tradition of internecine 
fierceness that characterizes boys' high school and college 
sports. Most of the small children's games — including a 
hundred forms that we have lost, in which there is an 
element of song and drama — were originally the games 
of grown society. Some of them, as for instance tag and a 
species of hill dill, were plaj^ed by the court ladies of Queen 
Elizabeth, and I believe that big girls and women would 
take to them to-day if they were introduced in our high 
schools and colleges. 

It should be remembered in all athletic competition for 
girls over fourteen that though it is still one of the forms in 
which they get their growth, it is not so nearly the all- 
inclusive form as it is with boys, that the instinct for com- 
petition is less fierce in them than in their brothers, and 
that as one result they are more easily saturated with it. 
A girl gets overtrained, gets working on her nerve and 
conscience, looking green and thin, under a course of train- 
ing on which a boy of the same age would grow fat. It isi 



396 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

not excess of mere physical exercise that produces this re- 
sult, — women are said to be, in this respect, at least as 
enduring as men — the trouble with them is that physical 
competition is not so nearly their sole instinctive business 
in life, and that they cannot live on it so well. 

Big girls, over fourteen, ought, all the same, to keep on 
with their running and throwing games ; and they will 
keep on if they get a good start during the tomboy age. 
They will be especially likely to do so if such games become 
the fashion as they now bid fair to do. But the competition 
should not be of the very fiercest sort. If girls play inter- 
scholastic games, they must not be backed by that hysteria 
on the part of the graduates which boys are subjected to. 
Girls ought to laugh and squeal over their games, not 
play them in the dogged spirit characteristic of young men's 
competition. 

Climbing is still good for big girls. Shinning up a rope, 
indeed, seems to be included in all gymnastic courses es- 
pecially arranged for them. Other exercises favorably 
regarded by the experts include rowing, paddling, coasting, 
skiing — which should certainly be encouraged if only for 
the joy of the bystanders in the wingless victory effect. 
Walking is always spoken of as a good exercise, as 'no doubt 
it is ; and the fact is important, as it is in most places almost 
the only outdoor kind that girls can take during a great 
part of the year. Of course it is better where there is up 
and down hill, some running and climbing in it, and something 
to see that nourishes the soul. 

Swimming is always mentioned as excellent for girls. 
Mermaids are to this day more common than mermen, and 
there are girls who seem born to this profession, having 
among other advantages an apparent imperviousness to 
cold. And yet I always suspect that the praise given to 



GIRLS 397 

this exercise by those who approach the subject from 
the physiological side is somewhat exaggerated. I cannot 
believe that a pursuit that is not a game and in which 
exhaustion proceeds as much from loss of heat as from mus- 
cular exertion can ever have the highest value for body or 
mind. 

The traditional exercise for grown girls of course is dancing. 
Among little girls dancing should not be given so prominent 
a place as to divert the current of the tomboy age; at no 
age should solo performances be taught or dances naturally 
producing soloists; social dancing should be confined to 
wholesome hours. But within these limitations girls can 
hardly dance too much ; and the more tired they are when 
the day's work is over, the better will dancing be for them. 

Girls like dancing better than any other form of play, 
and their instinct is not at fault. Folk dancing combines 
many elements of expression and, when so developed as to 
give room for originality, affords a wider avenue of growth 
than perhaps any other form of play of either sex. Dancing 
is musike and gymnastike in one, giving combined satis- 
faction in the form of gesture, drama, rhythm. It has the 
physiological merits of the best gymnastics, produces the 
exliilarating effect that comes from calling out all the physical 
resources in a natural way. The body is the earliest and 
still the most instinctive instrument of expression, the free 
command of which gives the deepest artistic satisfaction and 
also in its highest degree the sort of joy in mastery that a 
musician gets from handling his bow. Dancing is the first 
of the arts and the most intimate, parent of all the rest, 
and for the great majority of people the most available. It 
is the inmost circle of emotional expression, the first and 
most exuberant utterance of the joy of life.^ 

1 See "The Healthful Art of Dancing," by Luther H. Gulick. 



398 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

The folk dances have already proved their superiority 
to the so-called aesthetic dances that appeared in this country 
at about the same time, for the reason that they are more 
firmly planted upon instinct, are more expressive, are in 
short a truer form of art. It is to be hoped that we shall 
adopt a few of the best of them until tliey are played on all 
the hurdy-gurdies and danced in all our streets. Their point 
of introduction into "society" will be perhaps as figures 
in the German. 

Parenthetically it may be said that, though dancing is 
especially necessary for girls, it is instinctive in boys also, 
and might perhaps be equally important to them if they had 
not so many other means of growth. As it is, the especially 
masculine dances, the Highland fling, hornpipe, buck and 
wing, attract boA's and men, can easily be cultivated, and 
ought to be so. 

Dancing has the prosaic but most practical advantage of 
being a great economizer of space. It is not only the best 
play for girls over fourteen ; but is a kind they can actually 
get, not only in the country, but everywhere. Dancing can 
be carried on not only in schools and halls and playgrounds, 
but in the home. In our country it has moreover the in- 
cidental but not inconsiderable merit of drawing the families 
of our immigrants together, showing the children that there 
is something in the Old World knowledge of their parents 
that the New World cares to know. 

Skating is a form of dancing, and a particularly beautiful 
form, both as rhythm, as visual poetry, and as a direct 
bodily expression of emotion. It is praised by the experts 
as physically an especially good exercise for girls. It also 
stands at the very head of present playground provision in 
our northern cities because of the amount of fun, exercise, 
health, and human expression obtained per hour from a 



1 



GIRLS 399 

given area. No other form of play is so remunerative. 
Roller skating is of course a poor second, but it is a great 
and valuable resource to children in our cities and a potent 
reason for the extension of asphalt pavement. 

Every form of artistic expression is good for girls. Music 
is perhaps the most important, and no girl should be allowed 
to grow up without a moderate proficiency in singing, or in 
playing some musical instrument, if it is only the accordion 
or the Jew's-harp, unless she is able to show an effective sub- 
stitute in the way of drawing or painting. Dancing, some 
literary taste, and the habit of reading aloud should be 
required of all. There should be much story-telling in the 
school and on the playground as well as in the home; and 
every girl (and boy too, for that matter) should be taught 
some home games, including checkers. 

Very deep in woman is the instinct of adornment; and a 
most available art, one which has been as highly developed 
as any, and on which more money is annually spent than 
on all the rest combined, is that of dressmaking. Every 
girl should know how to dress becomingly and should take 
joy in doing so. Subordinate arts of sewing and embroidery 
should to a great extent have this motive back of them. 
Their teaching will both release a power of expression and 
emancipate from foreign fashion-makers and the monstrosi- 
ties they now impose upon us. 

Particularly important to girls is the dramatic art. In 
them especially should be cultivated the habit of acting 
charades and little dramas, giving dramatic sketches of 
plays they have seen, stories they have read, historical 
scenes that they are interested in. Interest should be 
centered upon showing the story to the audience, not on 
showing off yourself. Above all, the excellent performance 
should be avoided ; it is a receipt for bringing the nerves of 



400 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

all concerned to the breaking point and destroying all natural 
joy of expression. When the boys and girls get far enough 
along to really care about some dramatist, when they have 
an enthusiasm for Shakespeare, then indeed it will be safe 
to let them see what they can do with him to bring conviction 
to their friends and fellow pupils. 

In order that girls may. get the benefit of theatricals it 
is essential to catch them before the self-conscious age; 
somewhere from eleven to thirteen is perhaps the crucial 
period ; certainly after fourteen it will be too late. 

How far does the team sense exist in girls? Hitherto in 
this discussion of girls of the age of loyalty this main question 
has been left out. It is a question on which we have not 
yet data for a very satisfactory answer. Girls show as 
much of the belonging instinct as boys in the ring games of 
the dramatic age. They show much the same gregarious 
tendency — with about an equal capacity or incapacity to 
combine — as boys do during the Big Injun age, and acquire 
during that period something of the same rough training 
in the elements of just competition. Girls have certainly 
as much loyalty to the home as boys have, and it is cus- 
tomarily put to much severer tests. They are as loyal in 
friendship and possess as great a capacity for it. 

But when we come to the teapi proper, or to the gang — 
to the pack of young creatures running instinctively to- 
gether or combining in the achievement of a common enter- 
prise — the matter is more doubtful. Diana and her 
nymphs were certainly a team, even a gang. The Amazons 
are another example ; but these latter, as their name implies, 
were hardly feminine and should perhaps be cited on the 
other side. Upon the whole it seems certain that the team 
sense in girls is not so strong as it is in boys, while, on the 



GIRLS 401 

other hand, I am sure that it exists, because I have known 
instances of it. 

And as a practical matter the existence of the team sense 
Is the important thing. If girls have this sense it certainly 
ought to be developed. Whether they vote or not, women 
are citizens and are certain to exert a great influence upon 
government. And the better the civic sense is developed 
in them, the better citizens they will be, and the better in- 
fluence they will exert. Women have lacked skill in fulfilling 
the wider and less personal relations. Their loyalty is apt to 
be narrow, rigid, too much attached to particular individuals 
and particular forms. It needs training in the art of holding 
to the ideal image of a social body while remaining open- 
minded as to the means of realizing it, in seeing the cause as 
something greater than the leader, the essence as more endur- 
ing than the form. To see your personal choice for captain 
put aside and yet play the game with your whole heart, to 
find merit even in your opponent, and especially in your rival 
for influence within your own team, to learn that there are 
other heroes and other causes besides your own, are lessons 
that would not be thrown away upon the average woman, 
and that can be learned nowhere so thoroughly as in team 
play during the team play age. 

And then the development of the power to belong is im- 
portant not for ulterior reasons alone. Like all the powers 
developed under the direction of the play instincts, its value 
is direct and ultimate. The tempered loyalty of the true 
member, the trained ability to conceive and promote a 
common personality, — whether in the home, in the city 
or state, or otherwise, — is an essential faculty of human 
nature. 

Here again the tomboy theory is important, for tomboy- 
dom lasts an appreciable distance into the team age. This 
2d 



402 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

age, which begins in boys at about eleven, should by analogy 
with other signs of growth show itself in girls a little earlier. 
Young-ladyhood on the other hand starts at about fourteen. 
So there are nearly three years for good hard team play 
before this latter stage begins. To learn during these 
precious years to be a good team mate and a good comrade 
is for any girl an educational experience that will bear fruit 
through her whole life and in more than one relation. It is 
what we have had of this hard team plaj^ of boys and girls 
together that more than anything else has given us the 
American girl, — the best of our productions thus far. 






CHAPTER XLIV 



BOYS AND GIRLS 



The age of loyalty, more especially the second part of it, 
from about fourteen on, is the age of differentiation, includ- 
ing the marked differentiation of the sexes. The interest 
of each sex in the other also becomes accentuated at this 
time, — in boys perhaps a little later, near the end of the 
gang period, say at about sixteen. 

Not but what there have been symptoms in both cases 
very much earlier. It is said — though I know of no reliable 
statistics on the subject — that most boys fall violently in 
love — usually with a lady of twenty-five or thereabouts — 
before they are ten years old, and break their hearts over 
imagined slights from the unconscious object of their de- 
votion. And most of them, at any given period of their 
career, know some little girl whom they think particularly 
nice, or some bigger girl whom they worship at a distance. 
The sentimental history of little girls is, I believe, somewhat 
the same. 

In boys of the gang age there is, to be sure, a certain sex 
antagonism — at least there is a tendency in the gang itself 
to tease the girls and affect to despise them. This tendency 
may be the reverse side of sex attraction, or the future 
Benedick's instinctive defense against it, such as furnishes 
the theme of so many romances from Beauty and the Beast 
down. It is more marked in the gang as a whole than in 
its several members, who may in their private capacity be 

403 



404 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

very soft each upon some particular damsel, though they 
would rather die than own it. Still the tendency does exist. 
It is in the gang that the man's man is produced, with his 
condescending attitude toward womankind, from which 
some men, and even all the men of some races, never wholly 
recover. 

But when the new age comes, at sixteen or thereabouts, 
all trace of sex antagonism vanishes, for the time at least. 
This is the period when the youth becomes suddenly anxious 
about his clothes, shines at both ends, in boots and neckties, 
brushes his hair without being told, and even keeps his 
hands clean. Up to this time there was no use speaking to 
him about his nails ; now there is no necessity. 

The girls, on their side, undergo much the same trans- 
formation, though the symptoms are somewhat different; 
■ and if pains are not taken to give them other resources, 
their interest, if not stronger, is apt to be more absorbing. 

Hence there arises from both sides the desire of boys 
and girls to play together; and although there is not, as 
in the case of the other play instincts, any need of encourag- 
ing this tendency, there is great need of its guidance, and 
this not merely for the prevention of harm but still more 
for the securing of the great good that ought to come from it. 
Our problem is how to keep this great force of nature, the 
mutual attraction of the sexes, to its true task of producing 
strength and beauty. 

The first thing for us to remember is that this mutual 
attraction is not one but many things. Its issue is all the 
way from the worst to the best we know. If it has produced 
much of the evil in the world, — if it is so high an explosive 
that the spiritual doctors in many ages have forbidden it 
to the holy and to the carefully nurtured young, — it is 
also the source of the best things in life. True love is the 



BOYS AND GIRLS 405 

dearest possession of the race. Its presence would redeem 
a world of ugliness. Romance is of the stuff that makes 
life worth living — partakes of the ultimate, of what the 
rest is for. 

Sex attraction is never simple. It is not merely all things 
to all men, it is apt to be a great many things to each man, 
whenever it happens to him. 

In the first place no major instinct ever acts alone. Hu- 
man nature is a sounding board, which when one note is 
struck gives forth sympathetic vibrations, discords, har- 
monies, overtones. This note especially is so deep in us 
that there is very little in our nature that its awakening 
may not touch. The instinct of the chase is aroused in 
pursuit of the flying nymph. The fighting instinct, enlisted 
in supplanting rivals, may be stronger than the original 
motive and sometimes survives it. Where Venus is present 
Mars is not often far away. George Eliot says there is 
always something maternal even in a girlish love. Again, 
at the heart of true love there is a David and Jonathan 
relation of pure friendship — camaraderie — a marriage of 
the qualities held in common, supplementing that of opposing 
attributes — a relation illuminated by the hetairai of Athens, 
in whom it seems to have been specialized, and who, in this 
essential respect, seem to have been more wives than the 
wives of that emphatically man-ruled city. There is further 
in the social intercourse of boys and girls a large element 
of pure gregariousness. A crowd of them at a ball game 
is not very different from one made up of the boy under- 
graduates alone. In short, love itself, as the gossip con- 
cerning Venus has long suggested, is very susceptible, and 
always brings other emotions in its train. 

Then in both boy and girl, especially in the girl, the 
awakening of this feeling is so associated with the whole 



406 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

awakening of life that it is hard to say where the desire to 
live leaves off and that for love begins. To get into the 
game, to drink deep of the cup, to spend and be spent, to 
have lived and loved, to know the joy and beauty of life, 
its heights and depths — in some such formless way to every 
young creature comes the great vital impulse. 

Girls coming out in society are well named buds. It is 
the budding power of Mother Nature that is in them. It is 
the universal power of life and growth, the strongest power 
there is, that they are charged with. How far this force is 
committed to one form of discharge or another is different 
in every case, and in every case is difficult to know ; but that 
the form varies much according to suggestion and oppor- 
tunity is unquestionable, and constitutes our great respon- 
sibility. 

Besides being attended by other impulses, the love instinct 
itself is not a simple one. Romantic love is something 
quite different from mere desire, and has as much influence 
in checking as in producing it. Romeo's love for Juliet 
kills his feeling for Rosaline, not merely as having a different 
object, but as being in its essence an opposing force. 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
Admit impediments. Love is not love 
Which ahers when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove : 
O, no ! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken ; 
It is the star to every wandering bark, 
Whose worth's unknown, ahhough his height be taken. 
/ Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle's compass come ; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks. 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom. 

If this be error and upon me prov'd, 

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd. 



BOYS AND GIRLS 407 

The truth is that in this matter of the mating of hmnan 
beings, even in its simplest terms, we encounter a larger 
emotional phenomenon than that of sex alone. There are 
other motives present in the very passion itself that mate- 
rially affect the whole relation. It is true that the different 
elements are fused, act all as one. 

Forty thousand brothers 
Could not, \vith all their quantity of love, 
Make up my sum. 

But the resulting sentiment is aimed at something differ- 
ent from mere reproduction. With the advent of romantic 
love there came a new thing into the world. 

This deeper, more lasting, element in human love has 
solid biological foundation. Its absence, indeed, would have 
made a controlling factor of our life inexplicable. With- 
out it the whole phenomenon of infancy, with its corollary 
of growth through play, which has caused the rise of man 
and of the higher animals above their myriad competitors, 
could not exist. Infancy depends upon the home, main-, 
tained by a monogamous pair who feed, shelter, and defend 
their young during their period of helplessness. But to 
create the home, to build the nest and sustain the loyalty 
of the male through the long infancy of the offspring, there 
was required an emotional basis far deeper than that which 
had sufficed for less permanent relations. This great 
phenomenon of infancy, nature's latest biological invention, 
responsible in the main for man's supremacy, is the creature 
of the nobler elements of human love. The lover is, biolog- 
ically speaking, the decisive element in human progress. 

Our practical problem is how to develop the best in this 
relation among the vast possibilities that it contains. 

The solution is partly quantitative. There cannot be 
too much true love in the world, but there is such a thing 



408 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

as too much love-making; it is not properly a routine 
occupation, and if too steadily pursued will generate more 
emotion that can be safely handled. 

In part the way to escape this danger is, as we all know, 
by creating a diversion, providing other occupations and 
pursuits. This motive is largely behind the modern belief 
in athletics. It created the INIuscular Christianity of Thomas 
Hughes' day, from which we still benefit, and is partly 
embodied in the Y. M. C. A. It is also largely responsible 
for school extension, for boys' and girls' clubs, social centers, 
and all sorts of neighborhood and recreational development. 

Athletics for girls have not the same instinctive basis as 
in the case of boys, and can never take anything like the 
same place. Hard romping games may nevertheless greatly 
benefit girls in the matter of emotional stability, as in every 
other way. The tomboy survives in the level head and 
sense of proportion of the later period. 

From this quantitative point of view, the question is one 
of maintaining due proportion. Everybody is familiar with 
Leigh Hunt's advice to young ladies that they should keep a 
debit and credit account — balancing so many hours crying 
over a novel by a proportionate time given to sweeping the 
floor or other less harrowing pursuits — and the advice is 
good. 

But there are more intimate ways of dealing with the 
problem. A purely quantitative treatment will not meet 
the case. The emotional life of a girl of sixteen cannot find 
adequate expression in the romping of a very super-tomboy. 
It must have a more relevant outlet. I Besides, what we 
mainly want to do is not to sidetrack emotion but to pre- 
serve and utilize it/j We want not Amazons, nor even a 
succession of Dianas and attendant nymphs, but the develop- 
ment of all that nature gives. The lamentable thing is 



BOYS AND GIRLS 409 

not so much the evil that exists as the good that fails. Even 
our dance halls stand, upon the whole, for romance — the 
incorrigible romance of the human race. The greater evil 
is not in what they lead to but in what they leave out — in 
the lost chance for a finer relation, a deeper poetry. 

A good prescription in the case of boys is the direct en- 
couragement of romance. Every boy, before he becomes 
too wise to take them seriously, should read Scott and 
Lorna Doone. The better sort of love songs, like the Scotch 
ballads, are good at any age. 

There's not a bonnie flower that springs 
By fountain, shaw, or green, 
There's not a bonnie bird that sings 
But minds me o' my Jean. 

Burns may not have been a model of virtue in his own 
life, but he could state the case in a way to make the blank 
prose of mere sensuousness abhorrent. We want romance 
because we are made that way, and beauty is its own excuse 
for being; but Pegasus, in this case, can pull a cart if 
need be — and beat all cart horses and other motors at the 
game. There is no better police power than romantic love. 
As a mere question of safety it is a good investment. Noth- 
ing will make a lower satisfaction look more flat and tawdry 
than a remembered boyish ideal. 

With girls, I am credibly informed, the case is different. 
They have as a rule too much rather than too little of ro- 
mance, and can be trusted to have enough of it. 

Then there is novel reading. It is a remarkable fact, 
and I think a notable confirmation of my theory that love- 
making is many things, that we can safely play with this 
emotion to an almost unlimited extent as presented in good 
literature. Of the millions of novels read every year (count- 
ing each one each time) the effect of those which deal with 



410 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the matter In a right spirit is beneficial. And good litera- 
ture, especially in the form of novels, in which it is most 
likely to be consumed, is of great importance in our problem. 
After all, the chief intercourse of human beings is in the form 
of talk, and the best gift to any set of young people is some- 
thing worth while to talk about : the heaviest indictment 
of war is still, as Madame De Stael complained, that it 
spoils conversation. One instinctively sympathizes with 
the man who proposed because he could not think of any- 
thing else to say; and after they have said "Hello," ex- 
changed a few inquiries about the latest dance or ball game, 
and executed the then prevailing jest, what — under the 
yellow light of our present written dispensation — is there 
left for boys and girls to say ? The idle tongue — though 
idle, never still — is a more dangerous member than the 
idle hand. And what worthy occupation can it find among 
the prevailing interests of our young folks at the present 
time ? I put novel reading high as a beneficial agent in this 
matter. 

The pursuit which, above all others, is of specific value 
as directly satisfying the need of emotional expression is 
the cultivation of the different forms of art: literature, 
painting, music, dancing, theatricals. Some people think 
that all art is sexual, and certainly all the arts aflPord a ready 
channel for this emotion. Many a masterpiece has been 
WTOught out in the heat of a great passion. Singing, poetry, 
and other forms of music, are love's native tongue. Every 
bird has a love song, and every one in love, or at the special 
period of love, has a need to sing, and must suffer almost 
physical pain, lacking that form of utterance. The visual 
arts also are a cryptogram of the emotions, affording a 
satisfaction as real as it is inexplicable. Acting is another 
natural channel. We must cultivate in our boys and girls 



BOYS AND GIRLS 411 

every form of art for which we find capacity, and we must 
cease from stifling. Song is as natural to a young creature 
of our own species as to a bird ; but it is lost to us through 
the inhibitions of a too critical civilization. We must 
restore this natural voice — if in cultivated form, so much 
the better, but in some form at all events. The monotonous 
chant of the Spanish peasant girl, even the frank, unques- 
tioning bellow of the young Italian, is better than our arti- 
ficial, clodlike silence. 

But though I urge its usefulness in helping us to deal 
with a troublesome situation, do not let us cultivate art in a 
utilitarian spirit. Apollo, if we have won his favor, may 
be willing to set the muses to police duty, and to lend a 
hand himself. But he must first be rightly invoked. Beauty 
must be loved for its own sake, not for what we can make 
out of it. 

We must not indeed forget that art may be a stimulant, 
may excite more than it satisfies. Just what determines 
which effect shall predominate — and so leaves a balance 
on one side or the other of the account — we must presently 
consider. 

^ ... ... 

But ways of sidetracking emotion, or of working it into 
those forms of beauty toward which it tends, do not make a 
complete system for dealing with this mutual relation. 
Nature intended that boys and girls should play together, 
and no system of play education is satisfactory in which 
there is not large and suitable provision for this purpose. 

There are just now in this country certain conditions 
that make the need of such provision especially acute. First, 
there is something which I suppose has never existed in the 
world before, namely, the exclusive society of those under 
twenty years old — a separate civilization, with its own 



412 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

laws, customs, and public opinion, made up wholly of the 
immature. This condition is due partly to immigration. 
Children of immigrants, becoming wage earners at the age 
of fourteen — picking up our language and some of our 
customs, neither of which their parents understand — often 
become virtually the head of the family, learn to despise 
their father and mother on account of their helplessness and 
their old-fashioned ways, and get pretty thoroughly out of 
their control. Another cause is in the false individualism 
which sees the child not as a member of the family unit, 
but as an independent social entity. 

/ There is also the real need to fly the nest that comes at 
about the age we are considering. Girls especially, in homes 
in which the parents have not abdicated, are usually given 
too little freedom, — a condition not improved by the fact 
that others have far too much, — and for these especially 
there is a moral need of escaping from their mothers' apron 
strings. And no freedom, conferred at home, can be quite 
enough. You cannot get the full experience of swimming 
even on a perfectly slack line. 

The place for this emancipation, however, is not in the 
play of boys and girls together. There is room enough for 
it in what they do separately, in the school and on the play- 
ground, both individually and in team play. Our exclusive 
boy and girl society is neither normal nor necessary, and we 
should not submit to it. Older people, in this country 
especially, are much too shy in approaching those august 
social circles in which their children move. We must learn 
to be less bashful, to have our own dances and invite our 
children to them, and to insist upon attending theirs. There 
are some purely social advantages in such an innovation. 
In fact true society, in the more specially festive sense, will 
never come into being until the existing stratification is 



BOYS AND GIRLS 413 

broken through. Some of the most enjoyable parties I 
personally ever attended were at a house where they had 
the courage of their convictions upon this subject, and where 
the ages usually ranged from about eight to eighty. 

A second reason why this problem just now needs special 
attention is in the changing status of women, from one based 
on the family alone to one derived largely from a direct 
individual relation to the industrial and political community, 
as a result of which it is impossible to handle our problem 
wholly through the family relation. The family is not 
dead yet, and will not die so long as there is anything of 
human nature left in man. We must continue to act largely 
through home influence; but we must also act outside the 
family, and for that purpose must draw on the same force 
that has kept pure our family life. We must mobilize the 
mothers — turn loose upon society as a whole that surplus 
of maternal instinct that is left over through its lessened 
sphere at home. 

In some ways we already sufficiently recognize the im- 
portance of this problem of the play of boys and girls to- 
gether. What is technically known as "society" seems 
indeed, in this country, to be founded on nothing else, and 
to present its huge annual sacrifice of dinners, dresses, and 
balls, as a perfect hecatomb to Venus and Hymen acting 
in partnership. But there are other things that need to 
be done, and some things which society permits that need 
to be undone, before we can be said to have made reasonable 
provision in this matter. 

In the first place boys and girls should play together in other 
ways than dancing. The years between fourteen and sixteen 
for girls, and between sixteen and eighteen for boys, are the 
most critical in this relation, and they precede the proper age 
of steady party going. During these years, as well as subse- 



414 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

quently, much of their music, especially singing, and much of 
their theatricals, can profitably be carried on together. 

And boys and girls ought to play games together during 
this period. The equal athletic comradeship of the Big 
Injun age cannot indeed survive. The girl falls too rapidly 
behind to admit of the continuance of exactly that relation, 
while the boy now cares most for such games as football, 
in which she cannot possibly compete. Still there remain 
golf, tennis, even baseball, in which some girls can beat most 
boys, while with equal training many girls could come near 
enough in skill to the average boy to make it interesting. 
And there are plenty of games of the second rank in which 
equal prowess is not important. I have known the captain 
of a college football team to be thoroughly interested in 
games of prisoners' base, in which girls took part, simply 
as games, and to strive most strenuously to win ; and I 
have a similar reminiscence of "robbers and policemen" 
and of "new I spy." In such games as these, in which 
numbers are not fixed, every additional player helps in pro- 
portion to his ability. In those I have spoken of there were, 
besides the big girls, children down to the age of eight or 
ten, by no means to be despised in such departments of the 
game as guarding prisoners or making runs. And such 
mixing of ages as well as sexes is most desirable.. 

The minor games are also available in this connection, 
like three deep and like "the handkerchief game" — in 
which you stand in a ring and throw a handkerchief from 
one to another, while a player in the middle tries to catch it 
— which boys and girls will play together almost endlessly. 
Finally there are the hundred or more semi-dramatic games 
played by the children of this country fifty years ago, many 
of which still survive, and the best of which — being in 
their origin games of society and of the more cultivated 



BOYS AND GIRLS 415 

part of society at that — might well, as suggested in the 
last chapter, be restored to their original use. 

Grown people — the young married people and the married 
or unmarried people who are not so young — can do much 
in this needed rejuvenation of their juniors. Indeed they 
will have to take the lead. Very young people are far too 
solemn in their social observances, and far too much afraid 
of departing b}' a single inch from the straight and narrow 
way laid down in the fashions of their own immediate circle, 
to take any important steps in that direction. We ancients 
shall have to start the play ourselves and show them how. 

But whatever may be done in the way of singing and act- 
ing and games, the great play of boys and girls together is 
dancing, and always will be, so long as that form of amuse- 
ment is permitted. And dancing will always be a critical 
matter. It is a form of recreation that must be carefully 
guarded, that, for the sake both of safety and of successful 
art, requires favorable conditions. I speak especially of 
dances in which the boy holds his partner. Hands off is a 
wise old rule. Physical contact marks a danger line; and 
late developments in this kind of dancing go far to justify 
the fears of those who have always set their face against it. 
A well-established convention may, however, do much to 
lessen such danger. Personally I believe that the waltz, 
properly danced, has been not only safe but in most in- 
stances a means of safety, as providing a normal and artistic 
satisfaction. On the other hand no convention will ever 
efTectively guard, or justify, some of the methods of our 
modern dancing, much of which deserves the death penalty 
if it were only for sheer ugliness. 

But there is in all dancing another perilous element, and 
one of more general interest because of its almost universal 



416 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

presence in all the forms of art — namely, the element of 
rhythm, already spoken of in earlier chapters. This ele- 
ment is just now especially important because of the wave 
of rhythm that is passing over our country at the present 
time. Dancing has become a national obsession, amount- 
ing almost to a mania. Folk dancing, social dancing, 
aesthetic and dramatic dancing, dancing in imitation of 
the less graceful of the lower animals, dancing by old and 
young, by rich and poor, by the wise and the foolish — danc- 
ing by all kinds of persons and in every variety of form — is 
incessant in the dance hall, on the stage, and in the street. 
It has invaded the very ballroom and captured professional 
"society" itself. The Bridge of Avignon, celebrated in 
song, is nothing to America at the present time. 

The rhythmic madness is not confined to dancing proper 
— or improper. Our popular songs are all dance music, 
and are kept running in our heads so that we waltz through 
our sermons, write prescriptions in three-four time, and add 
up columns to the music of the Grizzly Bear. Our very 
conversation is a song and dance. The effect of this wave 
of rhythm upon the meeting of our boys and girls is seen in 
the great increase in the amount, and what we may perhaps 
call the intensity, of social dancing. It has indeed created 
nothing new, nothing that was not bound to exist in any 
case. That a popular diversion should be established at 
the point where rhythm and sex attraction meet was, in 
fact, inevitable. Our present obsession simply accents a 
permanent condition. 

The danger that rhythm gives to dancing is a danger that 
attends it everywhere : it is present in music and in oratory 
and, more or less, in other forms of art, — the danger, already 
noted, which constituted Fanny Kemble's objection to the 
stage, of generating more emotion than it satisfies. 



BOYS AND GIRLS 417 

In the making up of this critical equation between emo- 
tion and its satisfaction, rhythm not only adds to the side 
on which danger lies, but it also subtracts from the other. 
It both strengthens the attack and weakens the defense, 
arouses emotion, and lulls to sleep the moral and intellectual 
faculties. As has been said in an earlier chapter, rhythm 
acts as a narcotic. Like alcohol it dulls the finer sensibilities, 
relaxes the acquired inhibitions, lets off the brakes of custom, 
conscience, and public opinion, and leaves the stage free to 
the chance emotion of the moment. Such lulling to rest 
is a boon when the road is long and stretches straight ahead, 
but at other times it may be very dangerous. Kropotkin 
tells that hares sometimes become so intoxicated in their 
sport as to take a fox for playmate. It is often so in our 
dance halls. Emancipation by rhythm may lead as in the 
"Kreutzer Sonata," as well as in happier directions as illus- 
trated in "Fanny's First Play." 

The pow^erful effect of rhythm in promoting social fusion, 
breaking down the barriers of personality, and leaving the 
individual open to the suggestion of time and place and 
company is another source of danger. 

Here we have an instinct protean in its manifestations, 
possessing the power to abolish social conventions, exer- 
cising a hypnotic influence upon the conscience and the 
brain — a power that has manifested itself in orgies of many 
sorts, in religious and social frenzies, culminating often in 
human sacrifice, from the first tribal ceremony down to the 
horrors performed to the cry of pa ira. And it is this 
aboriginal untamed force, coming up out of the great sea of 
our subconscious nature, that is turned loose in our dance 
halls without any effective regulation or restraint. 

What are we to do about this situation? The answer, I 
think, is chiefly to be found in the great positive function of 
2e 



418 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

rhythm in our life. There is one good fairy left to make her 
gift. 

Rhythm is the common element in all the arts, the true 
parent of the Muses, who are simply the different incarna- 
tions in which the god delights and satisfies mankind. In 
discussing rhythm we are considering not the dance problem 
alone but the whole question of art and what to do with 
it. 

You cannot abolish rhythm. It is born anew in every 
child. You cannot safely leave it to direct itself. What 
is our wisest course? Where is it a benefit, a creator of 
beauty, an enhancer of our life, and where does it become a 
danger or a drug ? 

I believe that the answer to our question is found in the 
myth of Bacchus — of Bacchus the god of life and art, the 
god of wine, the god of the primal forces that well up in us 
— of song and esctasy — the god who entrances and in- 
toxicates, inspires and makes us mad. 

The Greeks were very conscious of the problem. They 
knew what art is if any one has ever known. And thej'' 
knew its dangers, and prayerfully considered in what direc- 
tion safety lies. They even had their Puritans, of whom 
Plato — whose discourse on education is largely a discussion 
of the different sorts of music and their effects — is an 
illustrious example. And their conclusion is expressed in 
the myth of the great god Bacchus, whom the Thebans 
imprisoned and who, in revenge for such mistreatment, 
drove king and people mad. In that story is compressed 
the conclusion of what was both the most artistic and the 
most philosophic race the world has seen. Our safety, 
according to the Greeks, is found in receiving the great god 
of life and beauty, of dance and song, of frenzy and in- 
spiration, in listening to his message and actively obeying it; 



BOYS AND GIRLS 419 

danger lies in the attempt to lock up the god and pretend he 
is not there.^ 

The Greeks themselves based their whole system of 
education on the twin pillars of gymnastics and music, as 
they called it, the latter nearly corresponding with rhythm 
in its various forms. Homer was their universal textbook ; 
even the Spartans had the war songs of Tyrtseus as their 
inspiration. They knew it was the same god Bacchus all 
the time : the Greek drama was an elaboration of the ritual 
with which his festival was celebrated. 

But it is not enough merely to receive the god. The 
world's great mistakes in dealing with him through all the 
ages have come from alternations of such passive recog- 
nition with the denial that inevitably follows it. The 
essence of our piety is in its activity : we must wrestle with 
the angel, not passively receive, but cultivate. Inspiration 
must stir to achievement, not put to sleep. 

The alternation between the denial of the god and his 

too passive reception — between puritanism and emotional 

indulgence — has been going on from the days of the Greeks 

down to the present time, and doubtless was an old story 

when the Greek myth grew up. Following the period of 

ancient art, through the long Middle Ages, puritanism 

reigned ; the ascetic was the ideal, and it was thought holy 

to deny the flesh. Human nature at last rebelled, and 

there came the renaissance, the rebirth of man, of the 

humanities, the rediscovery of beauty and of art. Then, 

once again, the god was too strong for the people, or their 

obedience became too passive ; art descended into sensuality, 

1 See Gilbert Murray; Notes to the Baeehae, and "The Rise of 
the Greek Epic." I have followed his interpretation, partly his 
words. Bacchus comes pretty near to being identical with native 
impulse, and the two ways of receiving him almost correspond with 
what I have called purposeful and exuberant play. 



420 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Then came another puritan reaction. And now, once more, 
the god denied by us, as by the ancient Thebans, is breaking 
from his prison, appearing in his cruder form, and threatening 
to drive us mad. 

And the solution now is what it has always been. We 
must stretch our virtue to cover human nature as it is; 
must learn not only not to deny the god but to receive 
him heartily, and grant him positive service — to take this 
great element of rhythm and work it into forms of beauty as 
an essential part of life. 

Specifically, danger is in the inartistic, the unformed. It 
is the too simple rhythm that is hypnotic, the rhythm to 
which you lie passive — that requires no effort of attention 
— sounds a lullaby to the moral and restraining faculties. 
I saw, at the World's Fair in Chicago, a West Coast Indian 
chief who could in a few minutes make his people nearly 
crazy over a simple bang bang bang on a packing case. 
The hysteria at college games is largely produced by cheer- 
ing based on the same principle. It is the same with the 
hypnotic forms of political or pulpit oratory. "Let the 
people rule. Let the people rule. Let the people rule." 
At the thousandth repetition you begin to feel that this 
sound contains some vast portentous meaning. Sleep 
comes with the simple recurring rhythm, the swing that 
goes on forever, the sound that carries you upon its waves, 
wraps you in a world where there are no longer any out- 
lines — no landmarks, no fixed facts, no hard realities — 
only a feeling without form, a drifting on the infinitely suc- 
ceeding waves. It is the ^a ira that intoxicates, the repeti- 
tion that narrows the active consciousness to a pin point 
of attention, the dismissal of activity toward any concrete 
end, while emotion keeps piling up until it reaches the 
bursting point or overflows. 



BOYS AND GIRLS 421 

Danger is In the too simple rhythm. But contained in 
every rhythm there is the potentiaHty of unending richness 
of expression. The immortality of Shakespeare is largely 
in the music of his verse; and that, throughout all his 
plays, consists almost wholly of ringing the changes on one 
very simple metre. It is in elaborating these finer implica- 
tions that safety lies. 

A concrete and infinite ideal of beauty is locked in every 
form of rhythmic expression, in dancing among the rest. 
Terpsichore is still one of the muses, though bad company 
has hurt her reputation. Nobody could be called a dancer 
who ever expressed the music as he felt it. And the ideal 
is impersonal, inexorable, wholly above our will, a law 
given us to obey or lose our chance. So long as it is a striv- 
ing after the ideal, every art — including social dancing 
itself — is a satisfaction more than an excitement. Wisdom 
is not in turning a deaf ear to the voice, but in religious 
listening to catch the fuller message that it bears. Where 
attention is fixed upon the reading and realization of the 
ideal there will be no vertigo, no frenzy ; the whirling dervish 
effects of rhythm will be avoided. 

•Art is active obedience to inspiration. Evil has come 
to us not from art but from the absence of it. It is the 
bald uncultivated rhythm that puts the soul to sleep. Es- 
cape is in the elaborated, the highly wrought. Even co- 
quetry — the frankly developed art of sex attraction — is, 
I believe, a safety on the whole. The spirit of an Irish 
dance, a Scotch ballad of flirtation, is a spirit of purity as 
well as beauty. 

Creative exertion draws off emotion into constructive 
channels, finding new forms of beauty in the unending pur- 
suit of the ideal. A principal use of sex attraction is to be 
wrought into the infinite forms of art. 



422 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Let us not be too fearful or too negative. Life, upon the 
whole, is good, not bad. It was made for Hving, not to be 
cast aside. The mutual attraction of boy and girl, that 
has in it not only the physical continuation of the race, but 
also the perpetuation of the family and of happy infancy — 
that contains great part of the interest and beauty of our 
lives — is not a power to be decried or fought against. 
We believe in life, not death, in art, not in asceticism. We 
welcome the love song of the bird, the blossom on the tree. 
We believe that wings were made for flying, the heart of a 
man for the heart of a maid, and that the object of it all — 
to be furthered by us and not obstructed — is that they 
might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. 

I have spoken on page 405 and elsewhere m this chapter of the 
many ingredients of love, including, besides sex, the maternal impulse, 
comradeship, and gregariousness. The last named develops, as 
membership intensifies, into fellowship, the love of the team mate — 
the guild brother or neighbor, as he is called in the New Testament 

— finally into that emotion of democracj^ passio democratica, that 
inspired St. Francis, George Fox, and Garrison. This last, in its 
highest manifestations, seems often to be combined with still an- 
other element, the power of imaginative realization, amounting 
almost to transmigration, that enables the person so illuminated not 
only to love his neighbor as himself but to feel that joy and pain, 
good and evil, are equally real and equally important whether they 
happen to one's self, to one's fellow man, or even to any member 
of the animal kingdom. 

As in the case of every other combination of instincts, an analysis 

— the above or any other — is always in a sense false. Love is after 
all just love. It is more than the sum of its ingredients : and sex, or 
whatever else produces the illumination, seems more like the making 
of a window, removing of a barrier and letting reahty appear, than 
like the conferring of a pecuUar power. 



CHAPTER XLV 



THE APPRENTICE YEARS 



Oliver: Now sir ! What make you here ? 
Orlando : Nothing : I am not taught to make anything. 
Oliver: What mar you then, sir? 

Orlando : Marry, sir, I am helpmg you to mar that which God made, 
a poor unworthy brother of yours, with idleness. 

At the beginning of the second or fully adolescent period 
of the age of loyalty comes the marked differentiation not 
only of the sexes but of individuals. This is the time of 
the parting of the ways, when the children who have until 
now been travelling all together begin to divide into groups 
according to their several destinations. 

I do not mean that up to this age children are all alike. 
On the contrary I know that difference of temperament 
shows itself almost with the first cry, certainly with the 
first kicking of the legs, and is marked at every period of 
growth. But at the beginning of adolescence the individual 
bias becomes much more emphasized and begins to take its 
permanent direction. The predilections of the dramatic 
age, when 

Jack will be a soldier 
And Maria'll go to sea, 

require much intuition on the part of outsiders for their 
translation into terms of ultimate vocational destiny ; and 
even those of the Big Injun age are hardly less cryptic in 
their indications. But when, at the age of fourteen, a boy 
or girl shows a decided set in a given direction, there is reason 

423 



424 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

to suppose that a lasting interest lies somewhere there or 
thereabouts. 

It is true there are many exceptions. Indications of 
permanent individual bias often anticipate this stage of 
growth, and sometimes wait beyond it. Mozart was a 
notable musician at the age of seven, while Thackeray dis- 
covered at forty that he was a writer and not an artist, 
De Morgan at sixty-five or thereabouts. In many people 
a distinct vocational tendency never shows itself at all. 
These last instances may, however, be due to the absence 
in modern society of the vocations, such as war and hunting, 
to which some of our inherited capacities relate. 

Besides these individual differences there is also the fact 
that different vocational tendencies bud off at different 
periods. Artists and musicians have usually created mis- 
givings among their wiser relatives before they have reached 
their teens, while of philosophers Plato says that no man 
should settle down to that profession before he is forty, 
and the Koran says that no prophet is called until that age. 

The period of adolescence is, nevertheless, in the majority 
of cases, the time at which the individual bent begins to 
show itself. 

But this clearer indication to outsiders of the final direction 
of the child's growth is not the most important vocational 
phenomenon of this period. Of even greater moment is 
the interest in his own future which now takes possession of 
the child himself, and becomes henceforward a conscious 
motive in his life. It is at this age that he begins to think 
concretely and seriously of what he is to do and be, to look 
forward to a grown-up career. The future, no longer as a 
dream but as a concrete reality, has become a factor in his 
world. He is hereafter not merely doing this or that as a 



THE APPRENTICE YEARS 425 

complete self-justifying exploit; each separate enterprise 
is now contributory to a larger, inclusive, total. To the im- 
pulse toward isolated achievement has been added a thirst 
for the achieving life. 

To a great extent the desire to reach out toward reality 
in this new and permanent form destroys the taste for 
occupations that do not satisfy it. All teachers know the 
big boy of fourteen who hates the more abstract childish 
lessons and can make nothing of them, but who will wake 
up and show a manly power to grasp real things, visible as 
such to him, if a way of getting at real things is opened to 
him. The reason is that, in his new vision of his future, 
he has begun to be a man, and his heart no longer responds 
to childish things. It awaits the call of the reality to which 
it is attuned. What renders him deaf to the instincts in their 
earlier form, urging him from behind, is the sound of the 
rapids ahead, among which real deeds are to be done. And 
it is largely the call of the rapids that must henceforth govern. 

It is true there is still a large element of dreaming in the 
look ahead, as indeed there always will be if the child or 
man is fortunate. The boys and girls still see visions of 
the prince they may some day meet or of the dragons they 
are going to slay. But there is a new desire to see these 
dreams in terms of the grown-up world, to plan how they 
will cook the prince's dinner, or study just how the dragon 
is to be come at in tending store. 

This new possession of a concrete future, and new thrust 
toward it, result in a desire to specialize, because under the 
actual conditions imposed by civilized society the achieving 
life implies specialization. 

So that both through the native bent declaring itself 
at this particular age and also through the desire for the 



426 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

achieving life — nature adding, as is her wont, a general 
clause prescribing action toward her object as such, to her 
more special enactment tending in the same direction : for 
both these reasons the age of adolescence is the age of special- 
izing, with particular reference to vocation. 

And this tendency to specialize will henceforth be an 
essential element in growth. The remaining years of in- 
fancy, from fourteen to twenty-one, constitute the appren- 
tice age, formerly well recognized as such, in which growth 
is by its own law directed toward those special powers in 
which the individual feels his future serviceableness to lie. 

Up to this time the child has tended toward an all-round 
growth, — each of his constituent instincts crying for utter- 
ance and having its part in his formation. His own impulse 
and the duty of others toward him has been the promotion 
of his general education, a leading out of all the forces of 
which his spiritual nature is composed. The good fairies 
present at his birth have each claimed opportunity to demon- 
strate and confirm her gift. Even when the child himself 
has failed to reach out spontaneously toward any one of the 
great instinctive capacities of human nature, it has been the 
educator's duty to stir him to such action. Some children 
have to be coaxed to eat, and it is sometimes the same with 
the play instincts ; the machinery is there, and the force is 
there, but it may require a shake to set it going. ITp to 
adolescence our aim should be to cultivate, in every child, 
the child universal — to know the gold is there and dig for it. 

Of course the method, even before adolescence, will often 
be through temporary specialization, the effort being to 
reach the real life somewhere, presumably where it burns 
most strong, and coax the flame to spread. But at the 
specializing age there should be a radical diflFerence of accent. 
It is now a question not of all-round growth, but of growth 



THE APPRENTICE YEARS 427 

toward a particular form of service. There are limits, in- 
deed, to desirable specialization at this or any age. Not 
only should the expected service be based on all the instincts 
that can possibly contribute to it, either in a major or in an 
ancillary capacity or by affording necessary recreation, but 
we should remember also that the job is made for man as 
well as man for the job and make sure that our neophyte 
does not quite lose his life under our course of preparation. 
But whatever may be the desirable limits of specialization, 
this is the age at which it instinctively begins. 

The appearance of the desire for the achieving life at just 
this period is no mere coincidence. It is an inevitable result 
of the new predominance of the belonging instinct. It 
is true that a contributory cause is in a simultaneous change 
of mental focus, a new ability to look ahead and see the 
future as it is. From this comes the bread-and-butter 
motive, "the wholesome stimulus of prospective want," 
very necessary to the majority of mankind and a help to 
almost all. So far as this motive governs, work and the 
preparation for it is what is known as drudgery, the doing 
of things not for the satisfaction of doing them — whether 
from joy in the process or from the mental presence and 
sufficiency of the end — but for an ulterior purpose which 
fails to lend such immediate illumination, such ulterior 
purpose being in this case escape from pain. 

But in the main the thrust toward future achievement — 
what may be called the work motive — is not the need of 
bread and butter. Apart from the direct tendency to 
specialize, it is the desire to hold up your end. Work, it is 
true, usually means making a living, because that is the 
usual way of doing your part in life, but it does not 
necessarily take that form. The wife and mother, as I 



428 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

have before observed, is considered a worker ; as is the artist, 
the scientist, or the reformer whose service is not paid for 
during his hfe ; money payment being evidence of work done, 
not a part or necessary consequence of the thing itself. 
The point is not in making money but in making good, doing 
your part in the social whole to which you happen to belong. 

Work is a correlative of duty. Its essence is not in what 
is received but in what is rendered. Work is a social func- 
tion; it is public and official, the filling of a part, the dis- 
charge of an obligation. It is the full expression of the 
belonging instinct. What makes the boy prepare to do his 
share in the grown-up world is his new perception that 
the grown-up world is to be henceforth his team : the ap- 
prentice spirit comes inevitably with the enlarged conception 
of the gang to include the social order in which he finds 
himself. It has dawned upon him that he is himself by his 
very nature a citizen, a member of the community ; and he 
wants to measure up, to be a member in full standing, to 
say "We, the citizens of Ghent," to enter as an equal into 
grown-up social life, as the gang member satisfies the stand- 
ard of the gang. It is the old team spirit which tells him 
that he must hold down his job as he would hold down 
third base. Work is always and forever an expression of 
the team instinct. 

The direct specializing tendency itself is also reenforced by 
the team sense. The best team games, as we have seen, are 
those in which each player has his special part assigned, be- 
cause it is only through responsibility for a special part that 
the whole fully enters into you — only as you are a bearer 
of its interests at a particular point that you receive the full 
voltage of the common life. The team instinct prescribes 
specialization in work as in other games, because that is the 
method of its fullest satisfaction. 



THE APPRENTICE YEARS 429 

The instinct to be somebody which in the Big Injun age 
demanded indiscriminate self-assertion — utterance some- 
how, anyhow, of the self as an outstanding fact against the 
world — now requires a social as well as an individual achieve- 
ment ; or rather, the social relation is now seen not merely 
as one of contrast and appraisal, — a silhouette of self against 
a social background, — but partly as one of combination, 
mutual absorption on the part of the individual and the 
community. The self that is asserted is now a person, a 
being whose life is involved in the fulfillment of social re- 
lations, who can fully live only as he is a functionary, making 
himself a place as a member of society. 

Work is thus a correlative of the team sense and would 
not exist without it. Without membership there would 
still be play of the other achieving instincts. And there 
would be drudgery, and exertion to the point of pain and 
weariness such as every animal endures. There might also 
be the direct and independent tendency to specialize, though 
not in the sense of taking a special part in a common life or 
undertaking. But there would not be work, because there 
would not be service to a whole : there would be no whole 
to which service could be owed. It is membership that 
confers the possibility of work, and puts a blessing on it. It 
is so from the first day the child says, " I'm Mother's little 
helper," "I'm the parlor maid," or "the trained nurse" or 
"the boy that brings the wood," down to the time when 
the man can say, " Now permittest thou thy servant to depart 
in peace." Work is the full flower of the belonging instinct. 
It is the team play of maturity. 

Work is the life-saver of mankind because belonging is 
the great moralizing instinct. "The day a boy feels that 
his work is worth more than he is, that day the boy becomes 
a man." (James G. Croswell). "Man" was the very 



430 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

name conferred in Athens on the new citizen. His work is 
to him worth more than he is because the team is more than 
he is, and work is that which serves the team. The mark 
of all true work is subordination to the larger will. Those 
on whom this tie will hold, who feel the ob-ligation and are 
bound by it, are the true workers and the true saints, who 
have found the way of life. 

The apprentice impulse is, as we have seen, the outgrowth 
of the team sense and of a specific tendency to specialize. 
It is essential to observe that instinctive specialization is 
upon some form of usefulness within, and not outside of, 
the child's native constitution. It is the form in which his 
natural bent declares itself. It points the way in which the 
vital force in him is headed, the only way in which it can be 
fully realized. 

Thus growth during the apprentice age has normally two 
dimensions : belonging, and the satisfaction of the other 
instincts that give the child's bent and prescribe his special 
form of service. The two are not indeed added, but multi- 
plied together. He aims not to make good aiid to follow art, 
nurture, science, or whatever the other strand may be, but 
to make good through such expression. True work and true 
apprenticeship are found at the crossroads where two main 
instincts meet, or more than two. It is by definition on the 
great thoroughfare of membership — on the busiest part of 
that thoroughfare, where all the people pass — for its charter 
is derived not from some exclusive gang or guild, but from 
the social body as a whole. And it is also on some other 
road along which flows another stream of life, and which 
may be any of the other play instincts or any group of them. 

Originally this other dimension of work, and of the growth 
of the apprentice years, was for men chiefly the hunting and 



THE APPRENTICE YEARS 431 

fighting instincts, for women nurture, with an admixture, 
for both, of the constructive instinct. The boy went hunt- 
ing with his father, and when he was old enough joined the 
war band. Girls helped their mother in caring for the 
home and younger children. Both found work for their 
hands in fashioning spears and arrows and utensils. Nowa- 
days the constructive instinct has a wider place, and there is 
through the development of the arts a larger element of 
rhythm. But, of whatever instincts it may consist, there is 
normally in the growth of the apprentice age this other 
dimension to be multiplied by that of membership. 

It is true the desire to make good is paramount, and will 
if necessary take the child across desert spaces where no 
other instinct leads. As hunger will drive the cat to seek 
food not by hunting alone, but by any method that will gain 
the end, so will the team sense drive man to face not only 
external obstacles but those more formidable difficulties 
that lie within his own spiritual nature. But such is not 
the way of natural growth. The apprentice years should 
lead up to the full fruition of the play instincts, their exultant 
satisfaction, not a denial of them. This should be the time 
of the child's best dream come true, when the doll becomes a 
real baby and the mud pie a real house, the ring-around-a- 
rosy a commonwealth to live and die for — the time when 
at the touch of reality the full power is turned on, the child's 
whole vital force let loose along the path where nature leads, 
and not away from it. 

This does not mean the coming of soft and easy times. 
On the contrary the apprentice years are for each individual 
the time of stress, of war with obstacles both outside and 
within, the time for hammering his tools, including his own 
nature, into the shape his future work demands. It is an 
inevitable characteristic of this period that there shall be 



432 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

hardship, pain, even the risk of death. Hardship and pain 
are, to be sure, not our real enemies. Wliat is to be dreaded 
is not the chance of war, but the having no chance, in war or 
otherwise, to wreak our natural powers in work. That is 
the real death — never to have the means of getting born — 
and it is to the avoidance of such death, through the forging 
of work's necessary tools, that the apprentice years are de- 
voted by nature's law. 

But supposing there are trades that do not possess this 
double satisfaction, services that must be rendered, and in 
the performance of which many men must find their liveli- 
hood, that are not in any considerable degree a fulfillment 
of any instinct besides that of belonging ; means of making 
good, but of no other form of satisfaction. That there are 
such trades, that a very large part of modern industry con- 
sists of such, is a matter of common observation. Although 
so great a man as Froebel seemed to believe, in his invincible 
faith in the perfect adjustment of the universe, that every 
talent had at least its spiritual market waiting for it, it is 
impossible for most of us to persuade ourselves that such is 
actually the case. There is in fact a great and tragic malad- 
justment between industrial work and spiritual requirement, 
constituting, I think, the most serious evil of our modern 
life. This maladjustment we must discuss in the succeed- 
ing chapters. 



CHAPTER XLVI 

THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 

Life is found in the fulfillment of those relations to the 
world outside ourselves that are prophesied in the play in- 
stincts, as in the relation to workable materials, to the 
family, and to the state. In most respects there exists at 
least the possibility of such fulfillment, — that which the 
world offers corresponding approximately to what nature has 
foreseen. The mother's love and appreciation meet the 
child's need as he feels it. She is much the sort of mother 
he would have made if the matter had been left to him. 
Conversely he fills a place that was waiting for him in her 
heart. So plants and animals and younger children meet 
the fostering instinct that is in us all. So the stars, the sea, 
the land, the infinitely varied phenomena of nature, seem 
made to arouse and satisfy our instincts of awe and curiosity. 
Nature furnishes material suited to our hand and mind. 
Her water is very good to swim in, her land to run upon, 
her trees to climb, her mysteries to solve. 

In the matter of self-support, also, nature's original pro- 
vision was equally germane. Hunting, fishing, fighting; 
striking and throwing ; running, dodging, lying in wait, — 
the forms of activity which her industrial system required 
were those most clearly prophesied in our instinctive impulses. 
The adjustment, here as elsewhere, was once sufficiently 
exact : spiritual expression was found in the same activities 
that supplied physical need. 

2f 433 



434 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

But as stated in the chapter on Drudgery (XXXII), it is 
not so now. We can no longer live by hunting and war and 
foray, but must, in order to be self-supporting, content our- 
selves in great measure with tying threads, selling ribbons, 
digging holes, or other even less apposite pursuits. A young 
man has spent the week bending over the columns of a ledger ; 
a young woman has passed the working days standing at a 
machine making a few simple motions of the hand. The 
hours of strength and youth, the golden morning hours in 
which the vital current is at its height, which mold life and 
destiny according to the use we make of them, have gone in 
such employments as these. 

As stated in the chapter just cited, the trouble has come 
through new and more effective ways of supplying our phys- 
ical needs. The Golden Age when man lived by nature's 
law has been forfeited by too much knowledge ; in the sweat 
of his brow shall he henceforth eat bread. Civilization has so 
altered the rules of the game that it is no longer our game as 
whispered to us in our inner consciousness. Some of our 
deepest instincts are thus left hanging in the air, calling for 
a fulfillment that does not exist, reaching out to do things 
that cannot be done and will get us into trouble if we attempt 
to do them. 

Even the creative instinct is disappointed in most modern 
employments. Specialization has been a great promoter of 
our industrial civilization ; and specialization, as we have 
said, is also an instinctive tendency, making its appearance 
at the apprentice age as a phase of normal growth. But in- 
stinctive specializing is along the line of some achieving in- 
stinct. It is of the kind that carries some art or calling to 
the pitch of mastery, so concentrating power that it may 
break through at some one point into a higher circle of 
expression. Even in that case there is need of supplemen- 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 435 

tar}' activity — no man is quite all singer, sculptor, scientist 
— no employment is so broad and catholic, so pervious to 
the motions of the human spirit, as wholly to convey the 
soul of any man. 

But specialization in our modern industry is not speciali- 
zation upon an art, nor according to the laws of art. It is 
not even specialization upon a service, upon a whole achieve- 
ment of any sort. It is specialization within the task, 
carried to so extreme a point, leaving to each worker so 
minute a contribution to the result, that nothing of sig- 
nificance remains — like the division of a fabric into pieces 
so small that neither form nor color is any longer visible. 
There is in much of our specialized industry practically 
nothing left that, except in the satisfaction of the belonging 
instinct, of which no form of work can be deprived, can 
serve as a channel for the human soul. 

It is this sidestepping of industrial life that is responsible 
for a great part of the active trouble, and what is worse, for 
much of the dreary emptiness and waste of life, to which 
civilization has given rise. The break is especially abrupt, 
and its results, accordingly, especially acute, in the case of 
children who go to work, particularly those who do so at 
fourteen, the age at which the majority now leave school 
and seek employment ; but it occurs in the case of the great 
majority of modern workers. 

It is true there are still many occupations that are widely 
expressive of the human instincts. Law has much of fight 
in it. In the framing and delivery of arguments and in the 
constant study of underlying principles it is both a great 
science and a great art, satisfying the instincts of creation, 
rhythm, and curiosity. Medicine and teaching, each in its 
way, call for the exercise of science in the cause of nurture. 
All the arts express the rhythmic and creative instincts. 



436 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

All the sciences satisfy the instinct of curiosity — also, in 
their true development, the creative instinct through the 
construction of hypotheses. A mercantile career in the 
days when, for instance, young men in their early twenties 
sailed out of Boston in full command of their fathers' ship, 
with much discretion — necessary in those days of swift priva- 
teers and slow mails — over crew and cargo, was not a 
tame affair nor lacking in demand upon the manly qualities. 
And even now there is virtue in any kind of business in 
which risk and leadership are combined. There are still 
vocations expressive of the great constituent impulses by 
which we live. But in the main, under our industrial civili- 
zation, it must with the great majority be otherwise. For 
every man for whom there is a place among the expressive 
trades there are ten for whom no such place exists. 

This is the tragedy of civilization — that the end of all 
our labor and our ingenuity has been, for the great majority 
of men and women, the defeat of that inner life which it is 
our dearest object to promote. Man is a stranger in the 
modern world. As encountered in his daily work, it is no 
longer the world to which his instinctive capacities relate. 

And this dislocation of modern life affects the preparation 
for the less expressive occupations as well as the practice of 
them. It makes impossible for the great majority not only 
the living of a normal life but the attainment of normal 
growth during the apprentice years. 

We may, if we choose, believe of a given youth that he is 
one of the fortunate minority who will find places among 
the expressive callings, just as we may believe that he is 
going to be president of the United States. But though such 
may be our pious hope in any given case, in the great majority 
of cases the hope must necessarily be disappointed. Except 
for a small minority of specialists and leaders, modern in- 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 437 

dustry calls for machines and not for men. Or rather it calls 
for parts of machines — pulleys, wheels, or cogs — which 
some supervisory intelligence is expected to assemble and 
set to work. I suppose it is even true, as aristocracy has all 
along contended, that too much education actually unfits a 
man for service in the lower ranks of industry. An edu- 
cated slave may do very well to manage an estate for his 
Roman master or teach his children Greek, but he is not 
wanted in the mill or on the cotton field. Where the hole is 
very small, a man-sized peg will not go into it. And the 
holes provided in our modern industry are the smallest yet 
evolved. 

It is this departure of industrial methods from the path 
of human life that has given rise to the controversy over 
cultural versus vocational education. Which shall the boy 
do, cultivate the powers that are in him or prepare for an 
industrial pursuit? Shall he train himself to be a useful 
member of society at the expense of abandoning all hope of 
other expression beyond the point attainable by an amateur ; 
or shall he cultivate mind and talent with the result of never 
making good ? That is the choice which the great majority 
of modern youth must face. 

And it is not merely a choice between making a living 
and gaining a life ; a normal life is impossible either way. 
Not to make good is to leave out the one most necessary 
element of life. To make good in a way that satisfies no 
other instinct is to be but half alive. For the great majority 
these two vital strands cannot be brought together in any 
pattern they are strong enough to weave. The evil for the 
average boy of the apprentice age is not merely that he will 
not when he grows up live a full human life, but that he 
never can grow up at all. The means of acquiring the full 
stature of humanity do not exist in either of the alternatives 



438 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

presented. He must either remain socially ineflFective, cut 
off from the tap-root of fulfilled membership, or must mold 
himself, body and mind, upon an industrial system that does 
not conform to the true image of a man. 

It is for this reason that competition in the professions 
is so intense. What we mean by a profession is what I have 
called an expressive calling, — a business which has a 
standard of its own, a law other than that of supply and 
demand which it obeys. A profession means a survival of 
true work, in which the joy of service is multiplied by the 
joy of obedience to some other law. Competition in the 
professions is not a scramble for dollars and cents; it is in 
most literal sense a fight for life. 

The difficulty is not one that can be got over by force of 
will. What shall call forth the life and power in a man is 
not given to any man, nor to all of us together, to decide. 
That question has been settled by whatever power selected 
the human qualities and their counterparts. Physically, 
man is an outdoor animal ; his heart and lungs and nervous 
system were made for great and sudden exertion, for pursuit 
and flight and contest, alternating with repose. These 
organs waste away, often become diseased, under the uncon- 
genial uses — or rather the idleness — that we impose upon 
them. 

But such physical maladjustment is the least important. 
Every power of man, every reaction that is given him to 
exhibit, down to the deepest in him, is relative to some 
destined end. Every voice in the human soul is made re- 
sponsive to some other voice, as King Richard lying in his 
cell recognized the music of his faithful minstrel ; it cannot 
answer to another call. 

We are not strong for all purposes ; we do not even exist 
to all ends. We are strong, we are here at all, only as we 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 439 

encounter the occasion to which our powers relate. Life is 
not the product of the soul alone, but of the soul in contact 
with its world. It is born in the meeting of two poles. 
The young man may have it in him to love like Abelard, 
but he will die passionless if his Heloise never appears. 
He may have the potential patriotism of a Mazzini, but if 
he is a man without a country the light will never shine. The 
soldier for war, the mother to her child, the painter to his 
canvas — that is life and ever will be, take it or leave it as 
we may elect. Man is a process, a reaction, a combining of 
related elements. He does not occur save as the combina- 
tion that was prearranged takes place. 

The deprivation is not of pleasure nor even wholly of the 
satisfaction of the achieving instincts. It affects the moral 
nature also. Modern industry does not call out the higher 
qualities. It is true of course — and the greatest good for- 
tune of our modern world lies in our perception of the truth 
— that useful work cannot be positively degrading. It is 
probably true also that a man can even under modern indus- 
trial conditions find use for all the virtue that he may possess. 
He can so add up his columns of figures that they shall 
become columns of strength and beauty in his life. A man 
if he has a hero's soul can at least die heroically under the 
worst of circumstances. But conditions under which death 
and renunciation are the best course left open cannot be 
considered satisfactory. The same can be said of life in 
prison or in an insane asylum — of any conceivable sort of 
life whatever. 

The question is not what the hero will do if he exists ; the 
young man has a right to such experience as will bring out 
the hero in him. He is not complete in himself, in character 
any more than in art or science ; no human being is or ever 
will be. What he requires of us is that other half of himself 



440 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

— his world, to which his moral as well as his other faculties 
refer. Du gabest ihm das Noth. Tending counter, tying 
threads, adding figures — whatever the happily placed may 
optimistically say about such occupations — do not impera- 
tively call out the latent powers of a man. They sound no 
trumpet to the soldier virtues. When the cities of Italy 
gave up doing their fighting for themselves, the virtue de- 
parted from their citizens, and liberty soon followed. To the 
eagle the best-appointed cage will not replace the free heavens, 
nor will the warrior soul be born of oflSce drudgery. Social 
conditions that do not present that affirmative demand for 
human virtue that nature intended and that savage life 
presented are not such as we can permanently permit. 

This break between civilization and the normal life in- 
volves for the growing youth a shifting of ethical standards, 
the taking of a crossover switch from one moral system to 
another, that is apt to be disastrous — an evil that did not 
exist during the barbaric age nor, for the fortunate classes, 
during the age of chivalry. The young page was sent to 
the castle of some noted knight to learn good behavior and 
military prowess, the laws of courtesy and the laws of war. 
There he had before him as examples the young squires who 
had already attained some proficiency in these arts in which 
he himself was a beginner. When he became a squire he 
had as his model the young knight, but a few years his 
senior, who had just won his spurs; and when he himself 
was knighted he still saw ahead of him, in the same line in 
which he had, from the first, been aiming, the knight of high 
achievement and reputation, the Chevalier Bayard or who- 
ever might then be the glass of fashion and the mold of 
form. There never came a time in which he had to pass 
from one set of ideals to a very different set, from one world 
of aspiration to another. 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 441 

Such a time does come to the modern boy, even of the 
fortunate classes to whom the more satisfying pursuits are 
most accessible. When at school his hero is the college 
athlete, but that bright figure ends the vista of his dreams. 
To him even the most fortunate member of our industrial 
community, the successful lawyer or business man, seems 
fallen from the high estate he occupied at college ; while the 
hero of the grown-up world, the railroad president or leader 
of the bar, appears to the boy, and even to the young college 
man, as simply " that old pod " whom he sees ambling up the 
street to his office, or occasionally meets at his father's 
dinner table. Life beyond the college does not appear as a 
continued growth, but as dying and being born again into 
an inferior plane of existence. And the same thing is true 
in greater degree of the boy who cannot go to college and 
who does not encounter lawyers and railroad presidents 
among his father's friends. 

Let us not lay the flattering unction to our soul that the 
whole trouble, or any essential part of it, is with the young 
man and his standards, and that all we have to do is to 
knock the nonsense out of him and teach him to see things 
as they are. The young man's revolt against a life too 
suddenly civilized is nothing new or whimsical. It is at 
least as old as Abel — the first victim, as I take it, of indus- 
trial progress — and will hold good so long as there is any- 
thing of human nature left. It should at least give us pause 
that most of us are living, and our young people are taking 
form, under conditions that the vast majority of mankind 
have looked upon as involving a disgrace. It is we that 
stand for innovation. It is our notions, not the young 
man's, that are abnormal ; and it is we accordingly who must 
show cause why he should submit to them. 

The young man's revolt against our industrial system is a 



442 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

moral revolt, the eternal protest of the manly mind against 
a way of life unsuited to a man. The young savage scorns 
all civilized pursuits as women's work. So does the male of 
the barbaric age. From Nimrod to Roosevelt, war and 
hunting, the instinctive occupations of the gang, are those 
most natural to the kings of men. The famous Persian 
curriculum was to ride and shoot and speak the truth. A 
free citizen of Greece may engage in war or politics, but even 
the fine arts too anxiously pursued are held rather fit for 
slaves. The same is true of the upper ranks of European 
society to-day. In all aristocracies war and politics are the 
only pursuits not held derogatory, while the only entirely 
respectable title to property is that which can be traced 
back to some form of violence. So, or similar, was the code 
in our own South before the war. So it is now among those 
races in which temperament still rises superior to education. 
The point is that, in all these cases, the objection to civilized 
pursuits is ethical. It is not hard work, but moral degrada- 
tion that is feared. Menial occupations are held by the 
Greek philosophers inconsistent with the cultivation of 
virtue, just as in European society to-day they are not con- 
sidered the occupations of a gentleman. 

These are not the ethics of snobbishness. The snob takes 
aristocracy as he finds it : the vulgarity is in his attitude 
toward it, not in the thing itself. The ethics of the gang, of 
aristocracy, are the ethics of the age of chivalry, of King 
Arthur and his Knights, of the Charlemagne of legend and 
his peers ; they are hitherto the code of youthful heroism 
and romance. 

No other occupation has yet supplanted that of soldier 
in the popular imagination, and it is not probable that any 
occupation ever will do so which does not actively call out 
the soldier qualities. We shall never, I think, learn to speak 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 443 

of the Banker of the Lord. Walt Whitman once chose a 
hatter for his hero. It was a brave attempt, but not suc- 
cessful. Hatters may, obviously, be as heroic as any one ; 
but our instincts do not recognize the heroic in them as an 
expression of their calling ; and their calling does not neces- 
sarily train such qualities. The soldier will always stand as 
an heroic figure to mankind because he embodies an heroic 
instinct. We are all of us inevitably soldiers, good or bad, 
because we are made that way, and the attaining of our life 
depends upon the development in us of the soldier qualities. 

Has a sentiment universally admitted until within a com- 
paratively insignificant period of time been so devoid of 
truth as we usually assume ? Is the Indian so wholly wrong 
when he refuses to surrender the free life of the plains to 
become the drudge of the factory and the dweller in a city 
tenement ? Was the chivalric ideal of devotion to love and 
war so wholly mistaken that the life of a mill operative can 
be accepted as in all respects an advantageous substitute? 
Was the opinion of the ancient philosophers that virtue and 
industrial occupation were incompatible so far astray that 
we can accept industrial occupation of the narrower sort as 
morally sufficient in itself? 

Already there are discernible signs of a suspicion on our 
part that there is something wrong, a sort of stirring in our 
sleep, a half consciousness of our exiled state. It is seen in 
our vicarious interest in sport, in the way in which gray- 
haired men will pore over the last imaginary details about a 
coming prize fight, in our football hysteria, in our mania 
for professional baseball. We have a homesick sort of 
feeling that there or thereabouts lies something reminiscent 
of a happier life. We turn to a hired expression of that 
which in ourselves goes unexpressed with something of a 
child's pathetic desire to get back home. 



444 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Further evidence of homesickness is seen in the grotesque 
expenditures of our milHonaires, in the futile steam yacht 
which the owner will be allowed to steer if it is smooth and 
there are no reefs near — he can hold the reins behind papa 
a little while. It is seen in the agonized palaces, " the pastry- 
cook's nightmare in stone and stucco" and the like, that 
adorn our cities. It is seen in the paying of large fortunes 
for celebrated pictures — millions for an example of some 
one else's play. It is seen in our helpless monuments to the 
unknown god of art — in our whole pathetic attempt to buy 
back life and play, to purchase the expression by others of 
the native impulse which we have neglected in ourselves. 

The young man's protest is that of eternal youth against 
the fallacy that the world is old. It is the protest of the soul 
of man, perpetually renewed, against the notion that social 
conditions are fixed, masters of life, and not its servants. 

It is not primarily the young man, but civilization, that is 
on trial. Civilization must make out a case. It must show 
that it has not neglected life itself in its devotion to the 
means of living. It is my own soul and genius that it is 
my business to fulfill. It is the only soul I have. If society 
does not offer what is life to me, is it not my duty to rebel? 
Civilization must show the young man a way of life to which 
he can without degradation submit, or it cannot rightly 
hope for his submission. 

This, then, is the moral situation as it confronts the boy 
who goes to work, or prepares for it. He feels himself a 
warrior, a hunter, a knight, member of a fellowship of such. 
His imagination seems to remind him of evenings when he 
and his companions stole down from the hills upon a cattle- 
driving exploit; crossed the ford to rescue some Kinmont 
Willie, or watched for deer. Is laying brick a fulfillment of 



THE DISLOCATION OF CIVILIZED LIFE 445 

his dream? Or tending counter, or adding up columns at 
a desk? Can he with self-respect consent to squeeze his 
Ufe into the strait-jacket of such pursuits, — his Hfe that 
should have been active and brave and free, — can he rightly 
permit it to be cramped into such mean dimensions, his 
nature, like the potter's hand, so pitifully subdued unto its 
calling ? 

We have here, in this maladjustment between man's 
native ideals and the industrial situation as it exists, the 
elements of a tragedy of that classic and inevitable kind 
which consists not in the defeat of a particular scheme of 
life, but in a conflict of ideals which renders all schemes of 
life alike impossible. 



CHAPTER XLVII 

HOW TO RECONCILE LIFE AND CIVILIZATION 

"Everyone must be pleased with his work." — Ancient Ordinaxice of 
Kuttenberg. 

Such is the disease of civilization — the denial to the great 
majority of life in their daily work, through the perfecting 
of the means of living — the substitution of utilities for ulti- 
mate?. The situation is not one that anybody designed. 
It has come about as an incident of the struggle for sub- 
sistence as carried on by beings of a high intelligence. It has 
been man's own ingenuity in finding new and more effective 
ways of self-support that has gradually edged him away 
from those primitive methods in the practice of which the 
childhood of the race was passed and which its instincts 
still remember. It is our efficiency in getting results that 
has estranged us from the ancient and more satisfying means. 

What can be done to mend this dislocation or to mitigate 
its effects ? 

In the past, to meet this difficulty, two successful systems 
of life have been worked out ; namely, the civic system, as 
illustrated in the ancient city commonwealths of which 
Athens is the type, and the chivalric. By systems of life I 
mean practical ways of living, based upon a theory of how- 
people ought to live, and illuminated by an ideal. These 
two systems differed in many ways. The one is ancient, 
the other medieval; the one philosophical, the other re- 
ligious ; one bourgeois, the other aristocratic ; one barbarian, 
the other civilized. But different as they were in so many 

446 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 447 

and such important ways, they were ahke in one fundamental 
respect. Both were founded upon the axiom that hfe and 
industrial work are incompatible. Both w^ere based upon 
the division of society into two separate castes, practically 
into two separate peoples, those who lived and those who 
did the work — the nobles and the people, or the people and 
the slaves. (The word " people " was never applied to both.) 
In both systems the doing of useful work was held degrad- 
ing, incompatible with inclusion among the living caste ; in 
both the workers were regarded simply as instruments of 
production, like tools or cattle ; in neither did they count as 
human beings. 

And these systems were alike in one other respect. In 
both cases the life of the living caste was to be secured 
through play. In the one case play expression was found in 
reversion to the aboriginal pursuits of man, war and hunting. 
These were the occupations of a gentleman. From Asur- 
banipal to our modern lion hunters, from the time when 
William the Conqueror drove the peasants from their land 
to make the New Forest, down to the time when John Bright, 
the plebeian, finally wiped out the more oppressive features 
of the English game laws, hunting has been the avocation 
of the upper caste, while fighting has been so much the 
aristocratic form of industry that where aristocracy still 
prevails it is a disgrace even to this day to own property 
acquired by any other means. To have made a fortune in 
trade or through any other useful occupation still involves 
something of disgrace; to present an unsullied title you 
must be able to prove you stole it or that it was stolen for 
you by your ancestors. 

The horse, as the necessary auxiliary both to the hunter 
and the warrior, became the emblem of this form of civili- 
zation. From the time when the mail-clad knight, mounted 



448 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

on his destrier or war horse, lorded it over the unarmed 
peasants and townspeople, down to the fox hunter of John 
Leech's pictures galloping across the farmers' fields, and much 
outraged at old Wurzel's unsportsmanlike behavior if he 
took measures to protect himself, it was the long day of the 
man on horseback, known then and since as the age of 
chivalry — the day of the caballus or nag's period. 

Chivalry indeed included the art of love-making along 
with fighting and hunting as a method of expression for the 
aristocratic caste, and as a result accented the secondary 
sexual instinct of dueling rather than of war as the pre- 
ferred outlet of the fighting instinct. 

The power of the hunting instinct in an aristocratic caste 
is seen in English law. Growing up under the administra- 
tion of successive generations of country squires, the rules 
of procedure and evidence were fashioned through the prob- 
ably unconscious operation of this instinct to produce an 
interesting form of sport — in criminal cases a real hunt in 
which the defendant was the quarry. Under simple rules, 
such as people interested merely in the practical aspects of 
the matter might adopt, with no limitations on the right 
and obligation to testify, it might often happen that any- 
body could get at the truth : the true sport consisted in 
giving the criminal a chance and then seeing if you could 
catch him. The hunting expression of "giving the fox his 
law" indicates the extension to the hunting field of the prin- 
ciples developed in the more elaborated form of sport. 
Jeremy Bentham, utter utilitarian as he was, wholly uncon- 
scious of the sporting point of view, by his cold-blooded 
attacks did for English law what Bright had already done 
for hunting and shooting, and so narrowed still further the 
field for the expression of this instinct. 

The ancient or civic system, unlike the aristocratic, sought 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 449 

the play expression of the Hving caste not in reversion to the 
aboriginal occupations of war and hunting that had pre- 
ceded industrialism, but in going beyond the latter stage and 
creating new forms of play. In painting, sculpture, archi- 
tecture ; in music, poetry, dancing ; in the drama, in science 
and philosophy — in the cultivated expression of the instincts 
of rhythm, creation and curiosity — and in the appreciation 
and discussion of these, the free citizens of Athens, for in- 
stance, reached what is still at most points the world's high- 
water mark. 

In both of these systems war and politics — the internal 
and external expression of the gang — held a leading place. 

The great thing to be noted about these two systems — 
at least the interesting thing for us, as bearing on the question 
of how to reconcile life and industrial civilization — is that 
they succeeded. Whatever we may say of their cruelty, 
brutality, egotism, or other shortcomings, they did actually 
perform for the rich man the supreme service that he, in- 
stinctively rather than consciously, sought from them in 
that they preserved his soul alive. His relegation of the 
drudgery of industrial labor to slave or serf, and reservation 
to himself of the expressions, barbarous or artistic, of the 
great constituting human instincts was justified in the result. 
The ancient system, broadly based upon the instincts of 
creation, rhythm, curiosity, fighting, patriotism, produced, 
especially in the ^Egean archipelago, 

Where grew the arts of war and peace, 
Where Delos rose and Phcsbus sprung, 

an unparalleled exuberance of mental and spiritual life. If 
ever any group of people truly lived, it was the free citizens 
of Athens during her great century. So fully did Athens 
2g 



450 PLAY IN EDUCATION" 

live that it is largely the pulses of her life, coming to us across 
the centuries, that supply what is most alive in us to-day. 

Aristocracy^ indeed, with its harp of three strings, could 
hardly produce a similarly rich result. But it almost made 
up in degree for what it lacked in kind. Aristocracy pro- 
duced the gentleman. Courage, personal dignity — the 
barbaric virtues, essentials of the manly character in every 
age — it did attain, and added to these the ideals of service 
and of at least a theoretical respect for women. 

And when in the Italian Cinque Cento and the golden 
Elizabethan age of England, an ideal was formed combining 
the elements of both systems, and the complete title of 
gentleman and scholar — greeting a combination of elements 
that to a generation earlier would have seemed incredible — 
was illustrated by such men as Pico della Mirandola and 
Sir Philip Sidney, the product was as bright and beautiful 
a figure as any age has seen. Sir Philip Sidney, indeed, in 
his death, giving the water brought for him to the wounded 
common soldier, anticipated that more modern type of hero 
who includes a universal human sympathy, the ideal of the 
nurturing instinct, among his attributes. 

These two old systems succeeded where they were intended 
to succeed — in saving the lives of those who built them 
up. They also, as a necessary incident, brought to the sub- 
merged majority the spiritual death they contemplated. 
The most pitiful circumstance in the world's story is that the 
unfortunate have not merely outwardly but really suffered, 
have lost not only happiness but life. It is not true that 
slavery was — at least until very modern and enlightened 
times — worse for the master than for the slave. It shut 
the master out from certain sources of life that we have 
learned to value ; but it shut the slave out from all the 
natural sources so completely that continued physical exist- 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 451 

ence almost necessarily implied his spiritual death. The 
long story — or rather the long and ghastly silence — of the 
centuries of slavery is one more proof that human life is so 
wrapped up in the instincts that form the child through play 
that where these are denied their scope life also is shut out. 
A voice here and there has come to us. An ^Esop, an 
Epictetus, a Spartacus, has uttered a blessing or a curse that 
has been heard. But from other countless millions nothing, 
hardly a shriek, has reached the outer air. 

One other essential thing to be noted about these two 
solutions of our problem of life vs. civilization — the ancient 
and the medieval — is that, whether taken separately or in 
combination, they are not for us, nor any system that in- 
cludes or tolerates the division of society into a living and a 
working caste. The great fallacy which, taking the truth 
that division of function leads to fullness of life, uses that 
truth as a support for the position that life itself is a fit 
subject for specialization, and can properly be assigned to 
an exclusive caste, is one that will not deceive us any more. 
Solutions based upon that ancient error are now not merely 
wrong; they have become impossible. Once awakened to 
the requirement of our own nature that we regard the spiritual 
needs of other people, we can never again attain life for 
ourselves while denying it to any other. The attempt would 
in us not merely leave out a strand of human life, but would 
establish a conscious lack, a pain and discord spoiling all 
the rest. Moreover, thanks to democracy, we now see 
other people not merely as creatures like ourselves, and as 
such equally to be regarded, but as belonging to our own 
team. They are comrades, members of the family, part of 
ourselves, communicants in the common personality in 
which w^e share. And we do not intend, in any arrangement 
we come into, that they shall be left out. 



452 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

These former systems, even the composite ideal of the 
two combined, can no longer serve our turn. The problem 
of democracy is the problem of finding some way in which 
not an exclusive caste, but all men, can live. No plan by 
which a part of the people are shut out from all hope of life 
can ever again be ours. We can tolerate no division, con- 
template no possibility of an excluded caste. What then 
can we do to lessen, not merely for a class, but for all the 
people, this break between the way of industry and the way 
of life? 

There are in general three things that we can do : fit 
our boys and girls to the industrial world as it exists, fit the 
industrial world to human nature, and provide an overflow. 

By the first of these I do not mean lopping the child's 
nature down to fit the bed we have made for it, but so bend- 
ing it that, if possible, it may still grow under the unavoid- 
able conditions, our aim being not efficiency but integrity, 
not increasing industrial output but promoting life. 

Under this first head of fitting the child to the world, the 
first thing to do is to cease to unfit him, to permit the powers 
that underlie industrial pursuits free opportunity to develop. 
Man as nature made him is a great deal more of an indus- 
trial being than our modern education has recognized. The 
instincts especially aimed toward useful labor are at present 
systematically starved. The creative instinct which impels 
little children to make houses and mud pies, small girls to 
sew, and small boys to work with tools — which, if we did not 
lock up the materials from the child, or the child in school 
away from the materials, would drill the maker in him — 
has insufficient opportunity to act. The nurturing instinct 
that makes every little girl a nurse, impels every child to 
care for plants and pets, makes him love to tend the horse, 
to feed the pigs, to milk the cow, which if allowed its natural 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 453 

scope would make him for all purposes a teacher and a 
fosterer of life — this mother instinct we also partly sterilize 
by permitting but meager opportunity for its expression. 
The rhythmic instinct that sets every phrase and motion of 
early childhood to music, and would do the same by all 
mechanical drudgery of grown-up life, is only now beginning 
to regain, through singing and dancing and drawing, its 
normal place in education. Even the scientific impulse, 
which we do cultivate, we limit to such feeble methods of 
expression as afford but a nerveless training compared to 
what it naturally exacts. Instead of the exhilarating course 
that it would normally have conducted in exploring, inves- 
tigating, classifying concrete phenomena, we confine it almost 
entirely to abstract problems, largely in grammar and arith- 
metic. And even in these we mostly supply the solution 
ourselves and ask the child to learn it, thus resterilizing our 
curriculum already sterile of methods applicable to produc- 
tive Hfe. 

Man is an artificer by nature, as also a doctor, nurse, 
teacher, investigator — a plodder even. It is by shutting 
the door on nature that we make a barbarian of him in these 
respects. Our children are far less prepared for the indus- 
trial part of life than can be the case in any savage tribe. 
To make small spears and bows, and use them, to help grown 
people in the hundred necessary domestic arts, is a far better 
preparation in this direction than any that our schools 
afford or leave time for. In our civilized life the civilized, 
productive, side of the child's nature is, for the first time in 
history, very nearly starved. 

I am not one of those w^ho think that even our present 
schools are upon the whole an evil. The training they give 
for social and intellectual life, through language and arith- 
metic and habits of regularity and order, more than makes 



454 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

up for the industrial inaptitudes they cause. But they do 
cause such inaptitudes, and in the most wanton and un- 
necessary way, by neglecting the industrial faculties, while 
taking up the time in which these, if we let the child alone, 
would be developed under the direction of his native 
instincts. 

What I am advocating in this first proposition is not 
definite industrial training, certainly not specialization, but, 
on the contrary, the all-round cultivation of the child. I 
would advocate the same even if it had no bearing on indus- 
trial life; for I believe that up to the age of adolescence 
the child's business is to grow, not to prepare for a vocation, 
but to become a man. What I desire to point out is that 
when we do provide an all-round education, we shall release 
in our children industrial powers which we now deliberately 
starve ; shall cease to train them away from the serviceable 
life that nature intended them to lead. I agree absolutely 
with those who uphold culture rather than direct prepara- 
tion for practical life as the true aim of primary education. 
I disagree only with the belief held by some of them that 
culture of the human being consists in developing only one 
corner of his nature, and even that in a peculiarly passive 
and ineffective way, and in thus incidentally unfitting him 
for useful life. 

When by truly all-round education we shall have restored 
to our children those strands of life that are now starved 
out of them, we shall find them possessed of a nature that it 
is not so easy to defeat. The first choice or preferred expres- 
sion of the boy's life will still be toward war and foray, and 
there will still be a real spiritual loss from insufficient oppor- 
tunity in these directions. But he will then have a strong 
second choice to fall back upon. 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 455 

And a second choice is with Dame Nature a vitally im- 
portant thing. It is true that the old theory of the general 
applicability of human force is untenable. Man power is 
not steam power, to be turned on to a guillotine or a church 
organ impartially. It must act toward its prescribed ends 
or not at all. But it is also true that human nature has 
more than one end toward which it moves ; and (a crucial 
point in this matter) there is in living things a wonderful 
power of substitution ; life that cannot find its way by one 
channel will often make out marvelously well by another. 
If the top of a spruce tree is cut off, it will use one of its 
higher branches to carry out its natural spire form. Men 
learn, if necessary, to see with their ears or hear with their 
sense of touch. Conversely, if a strain is put upon one part 
of the human organism, as on the legs or eyes, power will be 
transferred from the rest, and the member under fire, es- 
pecially the brain itself in which the life is focused, will not 
be permitted to succumb until the resources of the whole 
have been exhausted. 

And so with the total expansion of the vital force. If a 
preferred method is denied, it will find issue through such 
channels as remain. The genius that would have made w^ar 
its medium will force its way in business. A life denied 
utterance in music may find it in science or through the 
nurturing instinct. Just as the flavor of personality lies in 
things too subtle to depend upon the road it travels by, so 
the total genius of the man will often arrive so long as any 
of the main instinctive issues are left open to it. 

And each major instinct has so permeated our nature 
that it is capable of a great variety of statement. I alluded, 
in an earlier chapter, to the artist, familiar to frequenters of 
European galleries, who painted with his toes. The pre- 
hensile and manipulating instincts evidently lie deeper than 



456 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the separation of the paths which lead to the hands and feet 
respectively. The creative impulse lies deeper still, and 
appears under a vast variety of forms. Man will build in 
sounds or thought or rhythmic movement. Sir Henry Maine 
says that the Roman law — the great practical system of 
dealing between man and man that has survived the test 
of centuries and nations — owes the universal character 
which has given it currency to the Greek sense of form, 
derived by the Roman praetors from the Stoic philosophy. 
This most colossal of the works of common sense is, in its pe- 
culiar excellence, one of the world's great monuments of plastic 
art. Evidently the creative instinct is not easy to defeat. 

So the nurturing instinct, sprung originally from mother 
love, has worked back from that first utterance to such a 
depth that it appears again not only in teachers, nurses, 
doctors, farmers, but in molders of men in every sort of 
occupation. 

Among them the outputting human instincts cover so 
vast a territory that it is difficult to invent a form of occu- 
pation that shall be wholly outside their scope. Even the 
hunting and fighting instincts are not wholly disappointed 
in modern industry. Etymology seldom lies, and there 
must be some reminiscence of the chase in anything named 
"pursuit," I recently looked up a quotation in Herodotus, 
and the sort of breathless sensation of following up and 
finally seizing on the game was not distinguishable from what 
I experienced a few weeks later in the pursuit of trout. As 
to the fighting instinct, nature's magnificent blanket clause 
applying to opposition from whatever source, some use of 
this, though not usually in its aboriginal form, is absolutely 
certain to come in. 

To consciously make anything, to wield or handle or con- 
trol ; to seek, classify, arrange ; to hunt, nourish, cooperate 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 457 

— what possible occupation is wholly outside of these? 
What artisan, farmer, sailor, tender of a machine, does the 
small boy not envy? Men will nurse an institution or a 
cause, hunt gold or Greek roots or microbes or chase a rain- 
bow, belong to country, firm, club, Masonic Order, or sewing 
circle. So diffused are these root impulses that hardly any 
form of activity is wholly outside of their illumination. 
Applicable to very drudgery as such there is, as we have 
said, the rhythmic instinct — savior of generations of 
rowers and runners, of spinners and knitters in the sun, by 
setting their monotony to a lullaby. 

And the instincts are not only broad-based : the center 
of them is always on achievement, on getting the thing done. 
Nature is of a very practical disposition. The essence of her 
message is always, as I have said, "Thou shalt arrive." Not 
to wrestle and strike, but to conquer ; not to run and throw 
and lie in wait, but to bag the game, is the command on which 
her stress is laid. Complete satisfaction indeed is only where 
the instinctive end is gained by instinctive means. But 
where the choice is between means and end it is always the 
end that rules. In the prospect of grown-up achievement 
especially, her most cherished end — what she whispers is the 
real quarry — comes in sight ; and the weight and passion of 
every achieving instinct bids the child follow wheresoever 
the chase may lead. Nature is no pedant. Contempo- 
raneousness is of the essence of her law. Up-to-date infrac- 
tion is more germane to her intention than obsolete fulfillment. 
There is more real life in making an actual living by tending 
counter than in pious adherence to the ancient ritual through 
breaking and entering, raiding apple stands, or becoming 
a gentleman sport. 

So that the very instincts themselves are, in one way, on 
the side of the child's submission to whatever actual condi- 



458 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

tions may impose. They will rather pull him cross-lots to 
the end than take him round by the road that has ceased to 
lead there. 

When the immediate and visible occupation might of it- 
self seem wholly desiccated, it is often floated by the end it 
serves. Just as, in those ancient and heroic gorges in which 
you and your friend ate your way through the blueberry 
swamp and out the other side, the picking of the berries — 
which would of itself have been drudgery if you had been 
picking a boxful for the family — became fused into the one 
cerulean glory that colored the entire proceeding ; so in many 
other pursuits of life the human capacity of looking to the 
end, and seeing the process of attainment in the light of it, 
converts what would otherwise have been drudgery into an 
experience full of interest and delight. It is, indeed, impos- 
sible by merely looking at any man at work to tell what he is 
really doing. Two men are working side by side at the same 
bench. To the one the tune he works to — what he is really 
doing — is buying his wife a new dress or paying off the 
mortgage on the house : to the other, it is next Saturday's 
spree. Or to one it is some project for the emancipation of 
the working class, and to the other just grind, grind, grind. 
They make the same motions, produce to the ear the same 
sound, but one may be driving the nails in his own coffin, 
the other building the new Jerusalem. To one life may be 
drudgery, to the other a triumphal march. So in all kinds 
of human action the end swallows the means ; the color runs ; 
the two things, the purpose and the motions made in serving 
it, cannot be kept apart. 

Indeed so important to our race, so necessary to its health 
and happiness, is the satisfaction of accomplishment, that 
any form of activity which secures results, however insig- 
nificant, brings some reward. Almost the greatest punish- 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 459 

ment that can be inflicted on a human being is deprivation 
of opportunity for action ; the worst drudgery ever invented 
is as nothing compared to that. The only thoroughly re- 
liable sources of boredom are to be found in what may be 
called the three I's : Idleness, Idiocy, and Interruption. To 
do nothing, to be permitted to do only what has no meaning 
— as for instance in the study of formal grammar by chil- 
dren in the elementary schools — or, when you have got 
interested in one thing, to be dug up by the roots and made 
to do something else : these are the only sure receipts for 
producing a perfect and complete distaste. So far must we 
flee wholly to escape our birthright as active beings. 

And, in particular, the belonging instinct — the prescriber 
of vocation as the necessary way of making good — places 
its accent not on the means but on the end. The gang finds 
its most natural expression in raid and foray ; but under all 
is the central desire to belong. That there shall be a gang, 
not that it shall do particular things, was nature's dearest 
object in laying the foundation of this instinct. And as 
belonging, not the form of it, is the heart of his desire, so will 
the boy hold to real membership, under real conditions as 
they exist, in preference to the observance of any form of 
membership from which the virtue of actuality has escaped. 
What he wants is really to belong, to be in it in the grown-up 
world, to assume the toga virilLs, be admitted into the fellow- 
ship and councils, share the responsibilities and undertak- 
ings, of the clan. He would desire that such fellowship 
should express itself under the form of raid and foray if it 
could be so, but as between form and substance it is the sub- 
stance every time that he will choose. 

And as he comes to appreciate the fact that making good 
in the grown-up world involves industrial efiiciency — that 
the game now is the industrial game, and that the indus- 



460 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

trially incompetent are not really in it — it is the gang in- 
stinct itself that impels him to the acquiring of such efficiency 
more strongly than any other force could do. He will feel 
it to be a pity that we cannot all be knights and hunters, 
but given the impossibility of being such in earnest, he sees 
that there is more of real life in tending to business in our ple- 
beian way than in playing at Johnny War after the fashion 
of aristocratic survivals. Verily the first commandment of 
the gang spirit, as of the code of manliness in all ages, is : 
"Thou shalt play the game." 

It is at this age that boys begin to practice their team games 
in ways that are far from amusing, for the sake of ulterior 
results, and it is the team instinct that in the main must 
carry them through the drudgery that the acquiring of in- 
dustrial efficiency involves. It is here, in the apprentice 
motive, that the cross-lots power of instinctive impulse is 
at its full strength. The end is now the distant one of the 
total accomplishment of a life, and the desire is proportional 
to the desert space that lies between. 

It is, in short, the gang that must drive out the gang, 
through the boy's perception that the old gang occupations 
are child's play, and not the work of life — that the gang, in 
short, is not the real gang, but its kindergarten. 

The next thing we must do after preserving the whole 
nature of the child alive up to the age of adolescence is to 
turn his nature thus preserved in the direction of some kind 
of work. Remember the case of the chicken, who wull learn 
to follow any creature that walks before it during the period 
when its following instinct acts (the chicken's apprentice 
age) but will not so learn when that brief period is passed. 
Remember that plasticity and the passion to make good are 
not brought together in the growing youth for nothing, that 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 461 

their conjunction will last but a few years, and that now or 
never is the time to precipitate the achieving instincts upon 
the particular form of utterance that is most open to them in 
the existing world. Let his future calling walk before the 
child in the apprentice age that he may follow it when he 
grows up. 

It is not necessary to train at once for any special trade ; 
the immediate task may be to prepare for the university, 
deferring specific vocational training for another eight years. 
What is necessary is that education from this time on shall 
have a future to it, shall be felt by the child as preparation 
for real life. 

Our first remedy then is so to develop the child's nature 
to its natural breadth, and so to train it during the period 
when it is still malleable, and w^hen the gang instinct 
combines with the specializing tendency to set him upon 
fitting himself for grown-up work, that it may be turned so 
far as possible toward the channels that existing industry 
affords. This w^e shall do not for the sake of industry but 
for the sake of culture; not in order that the man shall 
make more goods, but that the making of the goods may 
better make the man. 

But, do our best in fitting our children to our w^orld, and 
granting all that can be said of the adaptability of human 
nature, there is much else to be done before an opportunity 
to lead a truly human life will exist for the great majority. 

Our second remedy must be to do far more than we have 
ever dreamed of doing to make our methods of industry 
fit the normal life. It will be difficult to do much in this 
way, and what we do accomplish may lessen our material 
output. But this latter consideration is not so important 
as we are apt to think. What is the use of more clothes, or 



462 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

even more beautiful ones, if we have no bodies fit to put them 
on ? I remember reading the remark of an economist, from 
whose mind the intention to be funny was as far as possible 
removed, that the happiness of the worker was a good thing, 
as it tended to increase production. We must learn to turn 
this argument right side up. And we must learn especially 
that under normal conditions the largest dividend from work 
is in the joy of doing it. In this form of return lies the great 
undeveloped resource of every country. 

There are three principal methods in which this portion of 
our spiritual revenue can be increased : first, by the adoption, 
in the few cases where it may be possible, of Ruskin's advice 
that industry shall be made more expressive of the creative 
instinct ; second, by restoring so far as may be the element 
of competition, expressive of the fighting instinct and of the 
desire of every man to carve out his own life in his own way ; 
and third, by the greater introduction, through industrial 
cooperation and by responsibility-sharing, of the element of 
team play. When the worker can feel that the factory is his 
team and its trade-mark is his flag, that he shares the per- 
sonality embodied in its product, there will come new life 
both to him and to the industry, and incidentally a degree of 
material success of which we have not yet dreamed. Those 
who say competition and cooperation are incompatible should 
go and see a football game. Man is mainly the product of 
these two ingredients. 

These ways of fitting the child to his work and his work to 
him are of vital consequence because to attain full life it is 
essential, as already stated, not only that we both make good 
and find some other form of instinctive expression, but that 
we find the two in combination. In the game of life, as in 
every other, the elements of satisfaction should be not merely 
added but multiplied together. The occupation in which 



LIFE VS. CIVILIZATION 463 

you find expression of the creative or other instincts besides 
membership must be that through which you also make good 
as a member of society — must be your work and not your 
avocation — if your life is to reach its highest mark. 

But even when we have done our best to train the child's 
nature toward modern industry and to conform our industry 
to the eternal human nature in the child, there will still be 
many occupations in which the best part of the worker's 
nature will remain unfulfilled, into which we should be loath 
to find that any of our children could be completely packed. 
Our quart of holy spirit will not go into the pint measure we 
have prepared for it or any foreseeable enlargement thereof. 
If we do not wish a great part of it to run to waste, we must 
provide an overflow. 



CHAPTER XLVIII 

THE OVERFLOW 

The remedy for the inevitable imperfection of any adjust- 
ment between human nature and our industrial system that 
we can hope to make is not in a return to barbarism, with its 
twin resources of fighting and the chase. When Charles 
Lamb could ask of a man whom he met carrying a hare from 
the direction of his own game preserves : " Is that your own 
hair or a wig ? " the end of the fully convinced stage of game 
preservation, even in England, had arrived ; and we are not 
now likely to return to hunting as a business policy. We 
cannot all play Indians to the extent of adopting their in- 
dustrial system, as ninety-nine out of every hundred of us 
would in that case have to be removed to make room for 
game. 

As to the fighting instinct, such sturdy partisans as Kip- 
ling and Roosevelt still advocate war on educational grounds ; 
and I suppose that the constant petty wars of the Middle 
Ages, and perhaps our own frontier fighting, were partly a 
sort of instinctive provision of that kind. But admitting 
the great importance of the fighting instinct, war is in reality 
no longer a profitable expedient for its cultivation. Besides 
its incidental disadvantages of producing death, disease, and 
graft, it has lost almost all merit as an expression of native 
impulse. To crouch behind a bank and be stung by a bullet 
sent by some one you never saw, and could not identify, is 
not very different from any other method of contracting a 

464 



THE OVERFLOW 465 

disease. There is little more pugilism in it than in catching 
cold. War is now a way of killing off the more warlike spir- 
its among the population without even giving them a fight 
for their money. If we would preserve fighting, in any sense 
that closely answers human instinct, we must abolish war. 

The same is true of dueling. That also has succumbed 
to the bias of civilization toward eflBciency. The rapier was 
the labor-saving device that wrought the first injury. After 
that invention you had hardly begun to fight, unless the con- 
testants were both very expert, before your adversary was 
dead — or else you were, which was almost equally incon- 
venient. Then came the pistol, which abolished the element 
of physical contact altogether and paved the way for drawing 
lots to see which should swallow the deadly pill and which 
the harmless one, so that fighting could be carried on by mail. 
In a truly civilized country, like Japan, each man kills him- 
self, and the labor saving is complete. The perfection of 
method illustrated by this correspondence school of fighting 
has banished the last trace of instinctive satisfaction. 

But although we cannot return to barbarism for our means 
of life, we can nevertheless learn a great deal from the aris- 
tocratic system of the value of the barbaric virtues, and of 
the expediency of utilizing, so far as possible, the instinctive 
methods of their development. 

Hunting we can to a considerable extent preserve, and 
there is no better economy than such preservation. Every 
live partridge in a populous neighborhood affords days of 
absorbing occupation for many sportsmen. The surviving 
trout is nature's truant officer, leading the erring child, 
youthful or gray-haired, back to her ancient school, in which 
a single day's attendance leaves him stronger for a month, 
while the day when he scored a good mark is a source of joy- 
ful remembrance ever after. 
2h 



466 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

Hunting with a camera has greatly increased our resources 
in this respect. With its increased demand for skill in stalk- 
ing, its more intimate approach to the life of the wild crea- 
tures, its appeal to the scientific impulse and to the artistic 
sense, and its much wider choice of game, it is a close rival of 
shooting as an instinctive satisfaction. And then the crea- 
ture hunted, though not possessed so fully for a moment, is 
possessed in his live state forever. Even hunting with a 
notebook is no mean resource for the real nature lover. 

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun, 
Loved the lily, left it on its stem ? 
******* 
Then be my friend, and teach me to be thine. 

Curiously close to the love of killing is the love of intimate 
acquaintance with wild life. In the case of all the song birds 
our laws already recognize that the latter now comes first. 

As to civilized satisfaction of the fighting instinct, 
although we cannot preserve war for the sake of its educa- 
tional advantages, we can nevertheless find some fairly eflS- 
cient substitutes. William James suggested the use of the 
dangerous trades, such as deep-sea fishing, structural steel 
work, police duty, for this purpose. Many young men have 
gone West and lived as cowboys, or served as bosses in mines 
or on the railroads, with the same intention. 

For those who cannot follow such trades, and for the time 
before and after a course in them, the convenient overflow 
is in our games and athletic sports. And the scope thus 
afforded to the fighting instinct is by no means to be de- 
spised. While the value of war itself for educational purposes 
has, through the progress of invention, constantly declined, 
the artificial substitutes for w^ar have by the same means 
reached a high power of expression. Head-hunting among 



THE OVERFLOW 467 

our fellow citizens of the Philippines is yielding rapidly to 
the superior appeal of baseball and American track athletics. 
Any mere game must of course lack the final appeal of ac- 
tuality, but on the other hand such a game as football, in 
the accuracy with which it follows the form and spirit of the 
fighting instinct, and fits the outline of surviving Man in this 
respect, is superior to the modern forms of war. In war, more- 
over, there must always be so much waiting and weary march- 
ing, so much starvation and disease — to say nothing of such 
tedious interruptions as death and wounds — as to render it 
a very inconvenient kind of sport. As a friend of mine has 
put it, war would be very well if you could get home to lunch. 

Of substitutes for dueling I have spoken in the chapter 
on the fighting instinct. It is interesting to note that the 
social dehabilitation of dueling in England was closely coin- 
cident with the rise of Muscular Christianity and the con- 
sequent exaltation of fisticuffs. 

For the sake of this overflow in the form of games and ath- 
letics, especially in the case of boys who have gone to work, 
we must make large playground provision for the apprentice 
age. Protean as our nature is, much as we shall learn in the 
way of substituting a new fulfillment for the old, there is, 
and will always remain, much vital force committed to ex- 
pression in the ancient way. And our playgrounds must be 
kept open at hours when the working children can use them : 
in the late afternoons, on Sundays, and in the evening by 
electric light. Long walks, hare and hound runs and the 
like, must be cultivated to satisfy the gang impulse on its 
raiding side. 

Our other great lesson in the provision of an overflow, or 
safety rail for human nature as it rounds the curve from its 
natural direction of development to that taken by modern 
industry, is derived from the ancient social system — not 



468 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

from barbarism but from civilized life. The great gift which 
civilization has substituted for the ancient values that 
it has robbed us of is in the form of art. Invention has here 
made us a return that outweighs all that it has taken from 
us in industry as an expression of human instinct and ideals, 
— or at least that may do so when we have learned the use 
of it. Here, if anywhere, is where we hit the trail again that 
leads to life. 

I remember a Swedish sailor on a friend's yacht, who had 
once saved money and bought a little schooner of his own 
and lost her, and seemed a broken-hearted man, who went on 
deck every night when his work w^as over and played his 
native Swedish airs and other music on a tin pipe. I suppose 
that nineteen-cent pipe was all that kept that man alive. 
That is what I mean by art. We can get the same thing in 
many ways if we will only use our opportunities — in music, 
painting, drawing, dancing, theatricals, and reading aloud. 

We Anglo-Saxons are the most incompetent of all the 
peoples of the world in this respect. Booker Washington 
reported a deeper degradation among the London poor than 
he had ever known among the Negroes of this country be- 
cause the Negro never wholly loses hope nor his sense of the 
joy of living. You cannot degrade an Italian below the love 
of beauty. However poor, he has always an aesthetic life. 
The Genoese cabman not only shows you the conventional 
sights but points to the sunset, feeling that you as a man and 
brother will surely sympathize. The Irishman has always a 
social life, and when not too much oppressed by American 
example will preserve the arts of dancing and of song. Even 
fighting is with him a social function. 

Art is the fulfillment of our creative instincts in richest 
and most elaborated ways ; it twines and multiplies together 
its interpretations of the sense of form, of rhythm, of balance. 



THE OVERFLOW 469 

of speed and space and mystery, up to a climax of which, 
without its aid, we never could have dreamed. It invents 
new blends and combinations, with new and excellent results. 
Art is play in its intensest, most sublimated form. The great 
artist is everywhere recognized as the great genius — • the 
interpreter of the basic instincts of the race. If civilization 
has balked some of our native impulses of fulfillment in their 
primal form, it has found in art a fuller and more lasting satis- 
faction than unassisted nature ever gave, or than the savage 
can conceive. 

There are in truth three stages of human development 
above the savage — the barbaric, the industrial, and the 
civilized. We have reached the second of these, but it would 
be suicide to stop there. "You persuade Farmer Giles to 
empty his rum barrel in the brook, but when next morning 
he awakens cold and uninspired, what substitute have you to 
offer him ?" To abolish war, and then to put no compensat- 
ing satisfaction in its place, is an exchange of at least doubt- 
ful value. We have got half across the stream ; we cannot 
go back even if we wanted to : our safety lies in pushing for- 
ward to the other side. The justification of peace is to make 
room for art. You cannot paint with somebody joggling 
your elbow, nor sing with people shooting off guns or banging 
at the door. The home is the field and market for the minor 
arts, and immunity from sack and pillage is necessary to the 
development of homes. It is in the piping times of peace 
that the arts flourish. But peace that has no time to pipe 
is barren. What is the use of ejecting the disturbing element 
if the band refuses to go on ? 

As a practical matter we must in our scheme of education 
cultivate more fully than we do the power of expression in 
music, in art, in science and in literature. No child of av- 
erage capacity should be allowed to leave school until he can 



470 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

dance well, sing a part song, and either care for some one 
science enough to carry it a little further in his leisure mo- 
ments, or attain to some expression in painting or literature, 
if it is only a rudimentary ability in sketching or reading 
aloud. A boy who has learned to play the accordion so that 
he really plays it in his leisure moments is better off than 
one who has studied years on the piano but never plays for 
fun. Not only the grammar school, the high school, the 
college, but especially the very trade school itself, must make 
deliberate provision for the development in every boy and 
girl of some form of expression outside of what their expected 
occupation can afford. 

And we must provide a market. There is no more dismal 
word than culture. And the trouble with it is that it is self- 
conscious. Self-perfecting, making yourself the end of your 
exertions, becoming a beautiful flower, — could any pursuit 
be more disheartening? You are bored even before you 
have begun. "Return, young lady, to your sampler, your 
piano ; learn five little songs ; read Shakespeare and Brown- 
ing and Ibsen ; attend symphony concerts, cultivate your 
mind." Is not this a recommendation to return to prison, 
to submit to perpetual young-ladyhood and dilettantism? 
What gives life is not self-absorption but self-forgetfulness, 
not composing yourself as a beautiful image before the glass, 
but subordination to some outside end. AVhat brings power 
and happiness is the thing required of you, something you 
have to do, making good, satisfying a market, not doing par- 
lor tricks. 

There is a real and serious difficulty here. How can any- 
body feel in our modern society that in following an art 
that is not his regular business, he is filhng a social need? 
Where is the demand? What is the market for the 
amateur ? 



THE OVERFLOW 471 

There is no direct or complete answer to this objection. 
Those for whom an actual market in the industrial sense 
exists, those who are paid for their work, we have already 
classed as belonging to the expressive trades. For them the 
special difficulty of our civilization, which we are now con- 
sidering, does not exist. But for the amateur — that is, 
for the very great majority of all of us — there is no market 
in the full sense, and no complete solution of our problem. 
Life and civilization cannot be made wholly compatible. 

And yet there are alleviations of this condition; there 
is much that can be done to make it better, chiefly by us 
amateurs for each other and for ourselves. 

In the first place the amateur is not so wholly without a 
direct market as we are apt to think, though it is not of the 
financial sort. There is the home market. It is the some- 
thing more, the touch of beauty though of a very humble 
sort, that as much as anything distinguishes the real 
home from the domestic boarding house. And there is 
the love market already spoken of. And then although 
the amateur's product may be — probably is — below the 
commercial standard, the real difficulty in selling it often is 
that it is non-transferable. There are cultured women whose 
value to society no money payment could express, who yet 
could not make a living through excellence in any market- 
able form of art. 

But there is another sort of market for the amateur, 
namely, in the social need of him. Suppose he gave up, and 
we had no longer any artistic expression that was not pro- 
fessional. What would be the result? We should in that 
case lose not only the amateur himself — with the ceasing 
of that which keeps his own soul alive in the thousands of 
cases where he is deprived of all expression in his paid 
calling — but should lose the professional as well. 



472 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

For the existence of all value depends upon the apprecia- 
tive power of those by whom it is assessed. Among the deaf 
the best musician lacks applause. Somebody — some set of 
people, or all the people in some degree — must afford to 
artistic attainment its world, the medium in which it can 
socially exist. There must be not necessarily praise, but 
recognition, — remark, blame, criticism, reaction of some 
sort, — ears to hear, eyes to see, a mind to understand, at 
least to be conscious of such proficiency as may exist. Art 
without a social need of it is a contradiction. It is sound 
without ears, light without eyes, food without living organ- 
ism. The social body is like those simulacra that Caesar de- 
scribes the Druids as making — great figures made of branches 
and filled up with living people to be burned as sacrifices to the 
gods. Our social body must be so constructed that there is 
a place in it for the artist — not that he may be burned alive, 
but that the divine fire of public utterance may reach him, 
for except as he is so reached he has no voice or part. 

And who is to fulfill this life-saving function of affording 
a demand for art ? Why, everybody as artist, for everybody 
is a part of the modern world : the people are sovereign in 
art as well as in the sphere of politics, and nothing has true 
place and social reality that is not real to them. 

But we need leaders, and especially non-commissioned 
officers of art, and these are to be found precisely in those 
people who make art their avocation, their second string of 
life, next to their regular work wherein they primarily make 
good. 

Therefore I praise the dilettante and the amateur. The 
salvation of art and therefore, under civilized conditions, the 
saving of the general life is in their hands. It is they who 
afford the soil for the growth of their fellow amateurs and of 
the professional alike. For the professional's real market is 



THE OVERFLOW 473 

not to be paid, but to be heard, and without the positive cul- 
tivation of the Muses by his audience real hearers will not 
exist. 

Is not there a demand then for the amateur ? Is the pres- 
ervation of life and of the joy of living in himself and his 
fellow citizens a sufficient object? There is for him a mar- 
ket that none other can supply, a place that he alone can fill, 
in the furnishing of a market for all art. It is a market for 
a market, and the demand, though not directly inspiring or 
insistent, is of a vital sort. It is not a small thing that is here 
at stake. Art in our industrial society is, as we have seen, 
most literally a matter of life and death, a necessary part of 
that overflow by which the surplus of divine current that 
cannot be carried in our desiccated industrial occupations 
must find its way. Culture ? Self-conscious ? Yes, as the 
leaf is self-conscious that serves as soil in which other forms 
more beautiful may grow. Our ancestors out of their scant 
resources founded Harvard College in order that polite 
learning might not die from among us. That was the 
Puritan response to the call of the humanities. Cannot we 
rise as high as they on what was admittedly their weakest 
side? 

It is here that there exists the great demand upon the 
budding power of girls, especially of those who now offer the 
most difficult problem of unutilized force — those, namely, 
%vho do not have to work and who have no vocation which it 
seems best for them to follow professionally. It is peculiarly 
the business of girls to be our cultivators in the arts. From 
the Vestal Virgins of Rome and Babylon they have been the 
priestesses of the hearth — the focus of the amenities of life. 
There will be no true revival of art among us until its Isa- 
bella d'Estes and its Elizabeths appear. Is then this read- 
ing, sketching, playing the piano, so poor and cold a business 



474 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

after all? Hard perhaps, but not so unresponsive if you 
put your heart into it, and bearing within it a vital interest 
of our civilization. 

I am not sure indeed but that in the more technical and 
the more emotional forms of art the amateur may have, 
iafter all, the best of it. Queen Elizabeth said that a gentle- 
man should not dance like a dancing master. Fanny Kemble 
found the actor's life unwholesome : the constant stirring of 
emotion, laying his heart bare every evening to make a 
Roman holiday, was not a normal way of life. Those whose 
business it has been to deal with artists, singers, actors, 
musicians, painters — authors even — know that a profes- 
sional aesthetic development does not always tend to pro- 
duce balance, magnanimity, or self-control. The rhythms 
were, I think, not meant to bear the major part in life nor to 
be the directors of our principal daily occupation. Those 
who cultivate them as a by-product may cultivate them best. 

Perhaps the most important statisf action of all, outside 
of the daily work — the most important portion of our over- 
flow — is in the form of politics, a pursuit which the priv- 
ileged classes have in all ages reserved for themselves, not 
wholly I think for the sake of retaining power in their own 
hands, but partly from an instinctive appreciation of the 
direct sporting value of a political career. The great dis- 
covery of democracy has been not that the people should for 
prudential reasons control their own affairs, but that they 
are under the necessity of doing so because of the spiritual 
values involved. The virtue of self-government is not in 
any superiority in its results, but mainly as it affords the 
widest and, outside of the home, the most natural expression 
of the belonging instinct. 

And the same advantage inheres in preparation for a po- 
litical career. The success of the English boarding school 



THE OVERFLOW 475 

and college was not in learning to quote Horace and write 
bad Latin verse, nor even in the cultivation of cricket and 
football, but in the fact that these accomplishments were 
regarded as the divinely appointed method of preparation 
for governing the British empire. Our schools and colleges 
must learn to put the same motive of political apprentice- 
ship behind their work. The political career to which they 
lead will never, it is true, for the average student, be so glit- 
tering as in the case of the English public school and uni- 
versity, but it can be very real, and very valuable to the 
individual as well as to the country. 

We must admit the young man into our councils, receive 
him into political alliance, and require political service of 
him. Politics is the best adult game there is, and as a 
direct instinctive manifestation of the gang it is one of the 
most attractive to the young — a truth that the professional 
politicians have long since found and acted on. Their name 
of "students" for their heelers-in-training shows insight as 
well as humor. The great advantage of democracy is that 
it affords politics enough to go round. We must learn to 
utilize our resources in this respect. 

In order that opportunity for life outside of vocation may 
exist, whether in the form of politics, of athletics, or of art, 
there must be, besides physical opportunity and a prelimi- 
nary school training, time and strength to devote to these 
pursuits. No one who works at a desiccated calling every 
day until he is tired out has any real chance to live. It is 
true that people are usually not so tired as they think they 
are, and can get more rest from games or dancing, or some 
other form of play, than they can from lying down or from 
merely being entertained. But besides play itself there is 
the study preliminary to the best forms of play to be pro- 



476 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

vided for, such as learning a language or mastering a mus- 
ical instrument. And even play itself requires some 
strength. 

We must accordingly provide that children shall not en- 
gage in full-time work before the age of sixteen, perhaps not 
until later still. We must solve the problem of part-time 
education, in order that other forms of growth may still go 
on while vocational skill and habit are being acquired. We 
must shorten the working hours of grown people in the inex- 
pressive trades so as to leave time and strength for a life 
outside of them. We must make a fuller use of Sunday for 
the purpose of carrying on that part of life that is left out 
of the week-day occupation. 

When we have done all these things — if we can do them 
without so cutting down material subsistence as to have no 
strength to play (a question depending mainly on the selec- 
tion and control of population) — when we have secured 
the benefit of all our industrial inventions by making them 
no longer our taskmasters but our servants — then at last 
will civilization be to the average man a clear and cer- 
tain benefit. Then shall we surpass the savage not only 
through escape from squalor and starvation but through a 
fuller and more expressive life. 

I have spoken of the use of Sunday as one of the oppor- 
tunities for reaching this consummation. I think it is tlie 
great opportunity. The problem of civilization is the problem 
of leisure. For those to whom leisure is denied, to whom loss 
of expression in industry is not made up in art or play, civ- 
ilization is of doubtful benefit. And it is especially to the 
leisure afforded by Sunday, in which there is not merely time 
but strength and daylight and the morning hours, that civil- 
ized man must look for recompense. 

Sunday is the day of compensation, the day of the fulfill- 



THE OVERFLOW 477 

ment of those essential aims for which the week day has left 
no room. It is the day for completing the pattern, for weav- 
ing into the texture of our lives those main strands of being 
which would otherwise be left out, and without which we are 
not quite alive. It is the day of the lost talents, of un- 
fulfilled possibilities, tlie day for saving sonie little fragment 
of the gift that nature made. 

Sunday is family day. It is the day on which the father 
is at home, the day for playing the new piece on the piano, 
for singing hymns and songs and reading aloud. It is the 
day for visiting museums and parks, — and it should be a 
condition in the charter of any well-mounted museum or 
library that it should be open on Sunday afternoons. 

Sunday is the people's university, the day of liberal educa- 
tion, devoted to the universal interests. It is the day for 
cultivating those things that belong to us not as industrial 
implements but as men, of which religion is the most impor- 
tant. The Talmud says, on Sunday the master and the 
workman shall be equal. 

Sunday is renewal, a rejoining of the primal sources of our 
life. In the island of Capri they have a pretty custom — a sur- 
vival such as one finds in all South Italy of the Greek proces- 
sional religion — in accordance with which the Madonna goes 
every spring to visit her former home down by the seashore 
where the church used to stand. There is an important sym- 
bolism in this old ceremony, and one in harmony wath our 
present theme. Sunday is the day for revisiting the ancient 
shrines, for excursions to our ancestral abode by stream and 
wood and seashore, for seeking the fountains of our strength 
back in our racial past. 

The true Sunday will be partly different for different men. 
Each to his natural habitat as Mother Nature calls. The 
artist condemned to office work will turn to his carving, the 



478 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

musician to his violin. The born teacher will spend his 
Sunday with the children — and all of us, I hope, are partly 
teachers. The hunter will to the woods, the poet to the 
hills, the soldier to some athletic contest. That which he 
should have been, and is not in his daily work, each man will 
diligently seek on tlie day given him for tliis very purpose 
that he should keep his soul alive. 

The forbidding of such pious pilgrimage on that one day of 
the week consecrated by nature, and by the wiser portions 
of our law, to the end that such pilgrimage may be made, is 
not truly a Sunday law, but a law that Sunday shall not 
exist. 

For the young the need of Sunday is especially vital, the 
loss of it especially severe. The master instincts of our 
lives are not all equally present at all periods. Youth is the 
especial reign of some of those whose fulfillment cannot be 
packed into the confines of a sedentary occupation. Our 
industrial world differs most markedly from that of which 
nature is still dreaming in every growing boy and girl. The 
young man is still in his heart a soldier, a viking : his soul 
is not fulfilled by adding figures or watching a machine. 
Obedience to the great expressive instincts is, for young 
people, a matter not merely of preserving life but of attaining 
it: the question is not of survival merely, but of whether 
they shall ever five at all. To our boys and girls from four- 
teen to twenty-one years old, of whom a large and increasing 
proportion of our factory population now consists, our Sun- 
day laws are a denial of life, the permanent dwarfing of the 
soul. 

The whole purpose of Sunday is a chance to grow and live. 
It is the one day consecrated by nature and by man to such 
fulfillment of our humanity as the necessities of our weekday 
labor cannot afford. When, on the top of long hours of 



THE OVERFLOW 479 

sterilizing work, we impose a Sunday law to rob the growing 
youth of this one day in which nature might have had her 
part in them, to make them strong and beautiful and happy, 
we have sinned against nature and against the spirit of 
Sunday, the brightest and happiest of our institutions. 



EPILOGUE 

PLAY THE RESTORER 

I HAVE described the process by which as I beheve the great 
achieving instincts build up the child. Man, the outcome 
of the process, is the incarnation of these instincts. His 
body is their tool and in great part their handiwork. His 
mind and heart are emanations of them. And the impulses 
that have produced the man also sustain him. It is in pro- 
portion as he is maker, fighter, hunter, nurturer, scientist, 
citizen, artist — achievement set to rhythm — that he is 
really there. Uninformed by these constituent purposes, 
he is a derelict, the left-off clothes of a soul that has abdicated. 
So long as these purposes are alive in him, his life persists. 
When they cease to operate, the flame goes out. 

In one, perhaps the deepest, sense man is these instincts, 
which thus build and sustain him. They are the ultimate 
fact about him, his active self, giving his true form and law, 
constituting the final irreducible substance of which he is 
composed. But these great master instincts are also some- 
thing more. They transcend the individual, they come to 
him from behind the veil, well up in him from an outside 
source. They are independent of his will, authoritative. 
Their voice in his heart — even though it speaks in an accent 
and with a word imparted to no other — is ultra-personal. 

Man is the product of the achieving instincts ; he is these 
instincts. And in a third, perhaps the truest sense, he is 
the act of their fulfillment. Man is a process ; his law is a 

480 



PLAY THE RESTORER 481 

law of action. Matter passes through him as through a 
wave in a rapid. It takes the shape which his law gives it 
just as it obeys the laws of gravitation and momentum in 
the wave. He is not the material, but the law, or rather the 
fulfillment of it, and exists in the act of such fulfillment. As 
the lawgiving form of each instinct is an ideal, so man is 
the coming true of ideals that unfold themselves within his 
mind. 

Of the ways in which the play instincts sustain the life of 
grown people I will not attempt to speak. To do so would 
involve a description parallel to that which I have given of 
the growing child. It would be a description not only of the 
sustaining by the play instincts of what already exists, but 
of their continued shaping of the individual. For growth is 
not confined to infancy. 

So take and use Thy work ! 
Amend what flaws may lurk, 
What strain o' the stuff, 
What warpings past the aim I 
My times be in Thy hand I 
Perfect the cup as planned I 
Let age approve of youth, 
And death complete the same. 

Man is still plastic to the purposes that formed him so long 
as he is jet alive. Infancy is for the acquiring of the vocab- 
ulary, for getting in all the elements that go to make the 
whole. Tlie perfecting of the instrument, refining it closer 
and closer to the invisible law of its best service, is the work 
of the rest of life. 

But though I shall not attempt to show the full play of the 

constituting instincts in this great process, I do wish briefly 

to describe their action not in sustaining and perfecting, but 

in rebuilding — in replacing the wasted tissue, recharging 

2i 



482 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

the exhausted mind, restoring life which has become im- 
paired. The process is somewhat analogous to that of growth 
in infancy. Sickness is a sort of second childhood ; the in- 
valid returns to Mother Nature as his best and kindest nurse 
and trusts once more to her promptings for the regaining of 
that which she originally bestowed. 

The laws of health are it seems to me the most interesting 
laws there are. The process by which food and drink and 
air become man is the most wonderful process in nature — a 
miracle in comparison with which everything else seems 
commonplace. 

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. 

But it is inJSnitely more remarkable that clay, through 
an intermediate process of vegetation, can become imperious 
Caesar and shape the destinies of the world. Air, water, 
carbon, enter the human body and in a few hours or seconds 
become character. What just now was a piece of doughnut, 
morally unbiased, appears as love or hate or aspiration, par- 
taking not only of human nature, but of the form and accent 
of a particular personality, down to a trick of manner in- 
herited from some remote ancestor. 

Or if we say the body does not actually contain character, 
but is only the instrument of its release, the phenomenon is 
hardly less remarkable. 

I am no physiologist, and am ignorant as to where the initia- 
tion takes place, at what stage the new substance is met and 
welcomed, gets its sailing papers, and becomes a partaker of 
the mystery. The ancient tradition that the blood is the 
life, the blood bond the basis of relationship, seems to have a 
physiological foundation. The blood has, at least, a great 
part assigned to it in the process by which matter becomes 



PLAY THE RESTORER 483 

charged with soul. Each drop becomes possessed, as it sets 
forth upon its mission, of the law and purpose of the in- 
dividual. It knows, or learns as it goes along, the form of 
the body as a whole, judging with accuracy how much of 
repair is due to one tissue, how much to another, and assigning 
to each its proper share. And the new tissues instantly 
understand the secret of the organism. Those constituting 
the body at a given time are, for their tour of duty, custodians 
of the will and character of the individual, intrusted with 
the tradition, to carry it forward and hand it on to others in 
their turn. The body is like an army in active service to 
which thousands of new recruits are every moment reporting 
for duty on the field, and in which each recruit, as he is as- 
signed his place, knows by instant intuition all that the 
veterans knew of the structure of the whole and his own part 
in it. It is like a cloud on a mountain. The cloud hangs 
there stationary, maintaining nearly the same shape ; but if 
you climb up, you will find that the wind is blowing through 
it, sending each drop of mist singing along at the rate of per- 
haps thirty miles an hour. What gives it its existence and its 
shape is not a certain body of material, but a law imposed on 
material that passes through it. Man is a vortex, a flame, 
controlling matter that comes within his scope. 

What can be done to make the flame burn brighter? 
Partly, of course, the question is one of fuel ; and one can 
learn every morning in the newspaper how, by using special 
materials, or even a special preparation of familiar kinds, 
one's vital energy and moral excellence can be enhanced. 

But fuel is not the only consideration. A breakfast-food 
philosophy is incomplete. Without food or air, it is true, the 
man will die. But he will die in any case unless he can im- 
pose himself on food and air, and imbue them with his pur- 
poses. Insistent heralds of the obvious love to reiterate 



484 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

such startling truths as that Napoleon could not conquer 
Europe without rations. But how long would it have taken 
his rations to conquer Europe without Napoleon? How 
many valiant potatoes could have done the trick ? 

On what, then, depends the ability to perform this miracle 
of subduing outer elements to the law of life ? What is the 
way to health ? For each of us there is an ideal body to be 
lived up into, a flower which the seed was dreaming of, not 
yet fulfilled. How can you go to work to realize it ? 

The first shock to notions derived from dealing with 
inorganic matter is that the body lives not primarily by taking 
in, but by putting forth, that the way to accumulate strength 
is not through conservation, but by using what you have. 
We are always teaching unfortunate children in our schools 
that if you take two from ten you will have eight left. 
Whereas in all the important affairs of life when you take 
two from ten you are likely to get about fifteen. If you 
take away eight, and keep doing it, you may land up with 
two or three thousand, more or less. 

There are people who think you can get rested by lying 
down. Even doctors sometimes tell you to do nothing. 
This might be very good advice if it were not for two things. 
The first is the difficulty of knowing how to follow it. What 
is the shape of nothing ? What color is it ? Where does it 
begin, how do you get hold of it, and exactly what is the 
process of its performance? The second difficulty is that 
the nearer you approach to doing nothing, the further you 
are from getting any good from it — that is to say, regarded 
as a complete regime. Of course there are rest and sleep 
and relaxation. But these do not build up. These are 
the gap between the waves and cease to be there when the 
waves cease. The prescription to do nothing is like the 
Irishman's account of how to make a gun — "Take a hole 



PLAY THE RESTORER 485 

and pour iron round it." Until you pour your iron there 
isn't any hole. 

So the first thing we learn is that the way of health is 
action. You have got to do something, to use the little 
strength you have, expend the income that is given you, 
in order to accumulate power or get well. 

So we prescribe exercise, gymnastics, using the muscles, 
moving tlie arms and legs. And then we find that the exer- 
cise does no good, that going through a set of motions merely 
makes you tired and after a time bores you almost to ex- 
tinction — in fact, it becomes a question whether life is 
worth living at such a cost, even if it could be so lived. 

Then as you experiment you find that some motions are 
less boring than some others. There are combinations of 
movement that seem to carry a certain satisfaction with 
them. You can jump with a chastened joy even when you 
are not jumping over anything. A muscle will do more, 
and take more interest in doing it, when it is working as 
a subordinate in some larger combination — particularly 
when the whole body is engaged. 

But even making general, instinctively coordinated mo- 
tions is still a somewhat dry pursuit. You cannot live by 
gesticulation even of the most satisfying sort. Pretty 
soon you find there is a mental element in healthful exer- 
cise. You are told that you must "enjoy yourself," "have 
a good time." And so you go yachting, take vacations, 
travel in Europe, frequent pleasure resorts. We have all 
seen the result of such attempts. Nothing in the long run 
seems to produce a deeper melancholy. The pursuit of 
pleasure is proverbially one in which the pursuer falls con- 
stantly behind. 

Some people, however, have hit upon a device by which 
this sort of existence can be improved. Young men, for 



486 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

instance, will go off into the woods with a canoe and an insuf- 
ficient supply of food, get themselves lost, and then see 
whether they can get out again alive. In this way many 
successful experiments have been achieved. As soon as 
the man is no longer seeking pleasure, but trying whether 
he can get out of the woods before he starves, he finds that 
there really begins to be some fun in it. 

There is evidently something in having to do the thing 
not for the pleasure there is in it but because, for some reason 
or another, it must be done. Subordination to a purpose 
you will find to be a standing quality in the activity that 
gives life and health. The spirit will not enter and build 
you up, will not lend its strength to you, unless you first 
lend your strength to it. It is not what you try to get out 
of a thing but what you put into it that is added to you. 

But it is not every kind of subordination that will make 
you well. Slaves are not particularly healthy, nor any people 
forced to drudge under exacting taskmasters. 

Usually the best form of subordination is in rendering 
some kind of service. Those who have had most experience, 
doctors as well as charity workers, agree that the thing that 
conduces most to health is work — work that is recognized 
and respected, and through which a person does his share. 
A woman taking care of her family is made well by it. A 
child who does his lessons well in school gets the same kind 
of benefit. The best thing for a boy or girl, physically as 
well as morally, is to have some definite duty to perform. 

As there is nothing that will kill faster than the conscious- 
ness of being an incapable, a useless drag on the working 
members of society, so there is nothing that gives life like 
the sense of competency. We live as we feel the require- 
ments of society fulfilled in us. 

One important thing that we can all do to heal the sick 



PLAY THE RESTORER 487 

is to help enlarge the general conception of what constitutes 
useful work, so as to include the service that they can render. 
Dr. James J. Putnam has written with authority upon this 
subject. The thing above all others that makes invalids 
is the fact that once below the standard of the industrial 
world, no other standard is provided for them. They 
have no recognized duties to perform. There is nothing 
definite required of them, and no recognition is given to 
anything that they can do. 

Society, like the individual, has an invisible body toward 
which it tends. When any person so places himself as to 
fill out that form, he is received into it. The life of the whole 
passes through him and sustains him, as the law of the 
cathedral thrills down through each detail, bursts out in 
the gargoyle here, restrains the pinnacle there, vibrates 
upward in the spire, and holds every stone in place. But 
this invisible body varies in its form. It exists in the minds 
of the people, and changes with their thought. And it is 
only the places that the public conception calls for that 
exist and in filling which a man partakes of the common 
life. There is a spiritual as well as a material demand, and 
the supply must correspond. Athens produced philosophers 
and artists because every citizen's conception of the body 
politic — the real Athens of which the Parthenon and the 
Long Walls were but the material reflection — included 
philosophy and art. So Sparta produced soldiers, Rome 
administrators, Yale football players. These were called 
up from the mass by the voice of the corporate ideal. A 
great tradition can raise up spiritual children out of the 
very stones. Individuals will arise to fill out the unseen 
body that the city has projected in its heart. 

We must so extend our notions of what constitutes society 
that even these last, tlie invalids, are members of the team, 



488 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

with a part assigned to them. In particular, there is a task 
ahead of us in working out definitely, for different individuals 
and classes of invalids, precisely what duties they can ful- 
fill. We must learn to see so clearly that society's supreme 
duty is the soul's health of each that the neglect to assign 
an honorable function, implying a moral demand, to any 
single member shall be abhorrent to us. We must insist 
that the invalid shall have a part. We must say to him : 
"We will not let you off. Perhaps you are the one with 
the hardest job assigned. You are holding the line at its 
weakest point. If you cannot contribute to material pros- 
perity, you can uphold the dignity of human nature where 
it is most imperiled." 

And the part assigned to the invalid is indeed important. 
The regiment could never charge — there could never be 
a regiment at all — if those stricken down as it advances 
were not a part of it. It is because, whole or wounded, 
sick or well, alive or dead, they are a part of it, partakers 
of its acts, still advancing with it in their hearts, triumphing 
in its victory, that there can be such a thing as a regiment, 
an army, or a state. It is Dr. Putnam who has quoted in 
this connection Clough's verses : 

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ; 

It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers ; 

And, but for you, possess the field. 

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 

Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 

Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 

Health is largely a social product. A hero, it is true, can 
project his own society, constitute through his own genius 



PLAY THE RESTORER 489 

an ideal world and be sustained by it. But for the average 
sick soul, such a feat is beyond its strength. 

We shall have inspired invalids, and genius in homelj'^ 
forms, just as we shall have science and art, in proportion 
as the commonwealth we carry in our hearts shall call for 
them. The creation of human personality, in this as in all 
its manifestations, is an act of faith to which we all con- 
tribute or from which we may detract. 

This same vital potency of the belonging instinct is seen 
in many ways. It is said, for instance, that politicians never 
die, so powerful to sustain is their function as official repre- 
sentatives of the community's team sense. Gladstone came 
very near to verifying that theory. When Balfour became 
a member of the House of Commons a row of medicine 
bottles permanently vanished from his shelf. Methuselah 
I think was some sort of patriarch or political functionary. 

As the muscle derives its health from serving the whole 
body, the body from serving the inclusive aims of the indi- 
vidual, so the life and health of the whole organism depend 
on its service of a larger whole. And the law of the social 
whole, in its turn, thrills down into all the members of the 
body until each feels the swing of the wider orbit and re- 
sponds. No drop of blood can go singing on its way con- 
tent and happy, unless the man is himself a servant. We 
are, for better or worse, citizens, parts of a social organism. 
Every tissue in us knows it. Our physical life depends upon 
our loyalty. It is true that loyal service may bring death 
in battle or in the hospital, but it is also true that the ab- 
sence of such service shuts out all hope of life. 

But there are other kinds of play besides belonging. 

Competition is the commonest element in all our games : 
to leave it out of the game of real life would be to make exist- 
ence flat indeed. A race in which all receive the same prize 



490 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

will not permanently appeal to any boy or man. To cut 
the connection between successful exertion and the result 
obtained is to lame the arithmetic of life and rob it of its 
normal satisfaction. No man will be really well and happy 
if ever the element of competition is abolished. 

But people are sometimes too sick to work, especially in 
the full competitive sense, and even when they can work a 
little, there are for every invalid many hours that must be 
filled in some less strenuous way. 

The simplest form of sport I have heard of was breathing. 
This game was invented by a friend of mine who had nervous 
prostration, and he told me it was the only thing that kept 
him alive. His invention did not consist of finding out that 
when your breath stops you die, but in learning that he could 
amuse himself by taking long breaths and letting them out 
very slowly with a hissing sound, a process which, besides 
providing him an occupation, must have brought the addi- 
tional satisfaction of being offensive to any one within hear- 
ing. This is what the psychological students of play call 
"joy in being a cause" — and joy in being a nuisance is like 
unto it, and a very close second at that. 

I remember one time when I was sick a niece of mine gave 
me a Japanese straw badger, and she fixed him with one of 
his arms up in the air so as to present a cheerful and enterpris- 
ing aspect. He was, I think, the first incarnation of Arnold 
Bennett's Denry the Audacious. I believe it was that badger 
that pulled me through, though the cure was shared by a 
nurse who kept me doing things, so that I was always looking 
forward to the next stunt, and a Japanese bird of a cheerful 
and adequate personality hung in a Christmas wreath. 

Just seeing pleasant things is a potent means of health. 
That is why girls make such good friendly visitors. Remem- 
ber also Kipling's lighthouse man who went crazy because 



PLAY THE RESTORER 491 

the steamers made streaks in his water. When he got on 
board a ship, where the lines ran all kinds of ways, he began 
to feel better at once. When you have been in a city, where 
ever^-thing goes at right angles, you can feel the vital cur- 
rents leap up again when you go out and see the rounded 
tree tops and sloping hills. The seashore is good if you 
don't take too much ; but most people, I think, would die 
if they could not get where there was something besides 
gray colors and horizontal lines. Travelling would really 
be as good for us as it is supposed to be if you did not have 
to die first, — that is, cut off all your other means of life 
in order to indulge in it. 

I remember associated charity cases in which the cure 
was helped by taking the patient out into the country, or 
even on a walk along Washington street to see the shops. 
Perhaps in the Washington street case there was stimulation 
in the football tactics required to win through that thorough- 
fare. 

Next to the play of the eyes there is the play of the hand. 
Man is a creature of the hand. He was built back from it 
as the tree from the leaf. It was, from the beginning of 
his career, his point of issue, the business end of him, what 
the jaws are to the wolf, the claws to the cat. As he first 
grew up from it, he can be restored through reverting to its 
use. Man in action is primarily a manipulator. His mind 
and temperament are built on handiwork and are attuned 
to it. In a few years from now you will find in every hospital 
manual occupation provided, fitted to the varying strength 
and talents of the patients. 

The greatest neglected source of health is in the rhythmic 
instinct. David was Saul's best physician ; Apollo was 
the father of ^Esculapius. Olmsted, reporting his experi- 
ence with the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, 



492 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

said that military bands, as well as systematic athletic exer- 
cise, had a great tendency to keep the soldiers well ; while 
sending money home (loyalty again) kept up their morale. 
The first and simplest expression of the rythmic instinct, 
and the completest for most people, is in the form of dancing. 
The mistake we usually make is to suppose that dancing 
is only for the very young. The right age to learn to dance 
is the age j'ou happen to be ; but the best age for the use of 
the accomplishment is from about fifty on. The instinct 
is as strong in the later as in the earlier part of life, and the 
need of using it is greater in proportion as we tend to become 
stiff in the joints both of body and mind. The last part of 
the story of the grasshopper and the ant — unfortunately 
omitted from all editions heretofore — is that the grass- 
hopper took the ant's advice, danced through the winter, 
and came out in better shape than the ant, who had been 
sitting all the time over a stove. 

Then there is music, the dancing of the mind, which has 
restored many, from the age of Saul down to the present. 

The most important play is play of the mind. All play 
is play of the soul — the forward projection of the man him- 
self in the universe of action. But man is a thinking animal. 
It is that little head of his that has won out against claw and 
horn and tooth. And it is the exercise of the mind that 
sounds the glad sources of his strength and makes him feel 
the gladiator he is. 

The mental element is in all play, but most in art and 
literature and science, and these are the best play of man and 
the most health-giving. Some people I know always take 
Walter Scott for a cold. Some consider Trollope a more 
effective prescription ; I believe, however, in reserving his 
Barchester and Parliamentary series for longer illnesses. 

We may keep our children too many hours in school and 



PLAY THE RESTORER 493 

we certainly keep them too many hours doing nothing while 
there. But school, rightly conducted, is as important to 
health as outdoor play. And in later years the mental 
kind of play becomes increasingly valuable. The lawyer 
averages healthier than the prize fighter, and a man can 
live longer on music than he can on golf. 

Back of this whole treatment, the secret of every cure 
through play, is the truth that the way to win life is by living 
it ; the way for any one to extend his personality is by act- 
ing out the personality he has. Here, in the human body, 
or ready to be absorbed into it, are thousands of molecules 
sitting round waiting to see what kind of sport you have to 
offer them. Is your invitation worth accepting; is the 
kind of game going on there one that is worth while to join ? 
Can you get up such an excitement, such a rush and con- 
course of those who have already taken part, that the on- 
looker is swept along in the contagion ? The game of health 
is like getting up a dance or picnic. You must go in with 
a vim if you would succeed. It is the big fire that spreads. 
Or it is like Tom Saw^'cr's method when he had to white- 
wash the fence. You remember that he put such artistic 
appreciation into his job, that the other boys, instead of 
pitying him, actually parted with their treasures for a chance 
to do his work for him. Now Tom Sawyer is the sort of 
microbe you must have in your system in order to attract 
the rest. And it is you yourself — the actual you that 
deliberates and acts — who, by the zest and impetus of 
the work you assign to them, can give to those already en- 
listed this triumphant and enticing character. 

And in all this upbuilding play there is the element 
of subordination. It is the successful following of some 
inner leading that carries its credentials in its face, seems 
entirely remunerative, infinitely worth while for its own 



494 PLAY IN EDUCATION 

sake, that is exhilarating. It may seem fantastic to trace 
the presence of this principle in the foolish plays of ex- 
treme weakness like the breathing game — though the god 
hides even there, just as in the most childish of the exu- 
berant plays. But in the play of the hands and of the mind 
the overruling laws of science and art become visible enough ; 
while the play of the eye is simply the play of art or science 
in the bud. To see a picture you must make one, and to 
wonder is half to understand. 

I will not undertake to show the use as medicine of every 
kind of play. I have indicated some of the chief veins that 
may be worked. Of hunting, fighting, and nurture, not 
spoken of above, it may be said that we all know the thera- 
peutic value of going fishing, of a good game or a good scrap ; 
while having some living thing to take care of, if it is only 
a bird or a geranium, is the best, and fortunately the best 
understood, prescription for keeping almost any woman 
alive and well. 

There are certain words written in our hearts that are the 
master words, that contain the possibilities of life for us. 
These are the ultimates, the things in which our actual life 
consists, to which all other vital processes are tributary. 
Play is obedience to these master words. We use the expres- 
sion "full play" for a thing that is acting as nature meant 
it to. The emotions play, the fountain plays, meaning the 
thing fulfills its function in the world. And so of man. 
Play is the word that best covers the things which he was 
wound up to do, in the doing of which he is most himself. 
It is by being citizen, nurturer, poet, creator, scientist, by 
actively filling out the ideal waiting for him, that a man 
can win or save his life. 



INDEX 



Abel, 265, 441. 

Abelard, 439. 

Achie^dng instincts, see Play instincts. 

Achilles, 238, 293. 

Adornment, 399. 

.^sculapius, 491. 

.(Esop, 451. 

Ages, the four ages of childhood, 

62-69. 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 357. 
Alexander the Great, 238. 
Alice in Wonderland, 104. 
Amateur in art, importance of, 469- 

474. 
Amazons, 400, 408. 
America, 103, 201, 206, 387, 390, 416. 
American, 38, 60, 82, 198, 199, 201, 

206; child, 138; cities, 362; 

club man, 169; girl, 115, 402; 

parent, 183. 
Anaxagoras, 86. 

Animals, 128, 130 ; see Nurture. 
Apollo, 17, 261, 411, 491. 
Apparatus, 212 f. 

Apprentice age, 423-432, 452, 460 f. 
Archimedes, 61, 247. 
Argonauts, 160. 
Aristotle, 61, 360. 
Arkwright, 265. 
Art, 151 f., 163-165, 310, 397-400, 

416, 422, 467-479 ; see Imagination, 

Story-telling. 
Arthur, King, 194, 302, 326, 336, 442. 
Asurbanipal, 447. 
Atalanta, 61, 394. 
Athenian, 327, 376, 389, 390. 
Athens, 389, 390, 405, 430, 446, 449, 

487 ; modern, 334. 
Austen, Jane, 395. 



Babyhood, 62-106. 
Bacchus, 287, 418, 419. 



Baldwin, 327. 

Ball, 38, 91 f., 206 f., 394 f . ; see 

Baseball, Basket ball, Football, 

Hockey. 
Barbauld, Mrs., 315. 
Baseball, 1, 2, 38, 70 f., 205, 206, 

281 f., 319, 331 f., 344, 414; 

beats head-hunting, 467 ; for girls, 

393-395 ; see Membership. 
Basket ball, 206, 319, 393, 395. 
Bayard, Chevalier, 301, 302, 440. 
Beethoven, 164, 294. 
Belonging, see Loyalty, Membership, 

Team play. 
Bentham, Jeremy, 448. 
Big Injun age, 65, 166-318, 321-334; 

in girls, 392, 394. 
Boston, 121, 154, 192, 199, 220, 232, 

352, 436. 
Boston Common, 334, 352. 
Boy Scouts, 363, 364. 
Boys' Clubs, 364 f. ; see Gang. 
Bright, John, 447, 448. 
Brooks, Phillips, 235, 236. 
Browning, Robert, 129, 470. 
Buddhism, 222. 
Burns, 409. 

Cffisar, 112, 158, 243, 355, 472,482. 

Camp, Walter, 39. 

Carlyle, 129, 324, 325. 

Cat (game), 205, 206. 

Charlemagne, 372, 442. 

Chasmg, 202-205, 393 f., 396, 456. 

Chesterton, G. K., 381. 

Chinese, 296. 

Chivalrj', 238 f ., 260 f.. 301-303, 372 f., 
440, 442, 446-451 ; see Bayard, 
Galahad, Horse, King Arthur, 
Knights, Roland. 

Chopin, 151. 

Christ, 262. 



495 



496 



INDEX 



Christianity, 222. 

Christmas, 115; shop, 317; toys,'292. 

Citizenship, 140-142, 336, 361-368, 
380-391,428; see Membership. 

Civilization, its ideals not those of 
children, 235-245; has side-stepped, 
433-479 ; should make place for 
invalid, 486-489. 

Climbing, 207-209 ; of girls, 393, 396. 

Clough, 488. 

Coasting, 209-211. 

Columbus, 103, 305. 

Competition, 186, 192, 328; should 
be preserved in industry, 462 ; 
see Fighting, Games. 

Concord Bridge, 388. 

Construction, 95-101, 127 f., 177; 
see Creative instinct. 

Cooperation, 462 ; see Membership. 

Creative instinct, 13, 95-101, 452, 
455-7 ; see Construction. 

Croswell, James G., 429. 

Crothers, Samuel M., 315. 

Curiosity (instinctive impulse to 
know), 12, 13, 86, 108, 112, 118 f., 
122 f., 131, 170 f., 172-185, 219 f., 
261, 289-295; see Imagination, 
Impersonation, Investigation. 

Dasdalus, 51, 261, 327. 

Dancing, 143, 287 f., 397-399, 413, 
415-422, 470, 474; folk dancing, 
398; war dance, 161. 

Dante, 311. 

Darwin, 32, 89, 99, 203, 221, 338, 377. 

David, 491 ; and Jonathan, 405. 

De Stael, Madame, 410. 

d'Este, Isabella, 473. 

Demetcr, 16. 

Diana, 126, 210, 214, 261, 353, 400, 
408. 

Dickens, 68, 222, 356, 389. 

Discipline, 183 f., 233 f. ; see Teach- 
ing. 

Disobedience, moral necessity of, 
240 f. 

Dolls, 1, 123, 126, 128; see Nurture. 

Dooley, Mr., 193. 

Dramatic age, 65, 107-165, 320 f. 

Dramatics, 298 f., 340, 363, 399. 

Dreaming, 308-318. 

Drudgery, 53 f., 263-279. 

Duck on a rock, 205. 



Eliot, George, 405. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 395, 473, 474; 
age of, 450. 

Emerson, 80, 99, 137, 165, 173, 262, 
271, 286, 289, 292, 304, 322, 372. 

England, 199, 222, 320, 450, 464, 467. 

English, 212, 271, 299, 314, 330, 
339, 354 ; authors, 389 ; boarding 
schools, 195, 243, 268, 325, 372, 
474 ; game laws, 447 ; jokes, 356 ; 
law, 448 ; middle class, 383 ; officer, 
347 ; race, 376 ; public school, 475 ; 
village, 383. 

Epictetus, 451. 

Europe, 60, 103, 390, 484, 485. 

European, 93, 249 ; society, 442. 

Evidence, that play is growth, 57-61. 

Exploration, see Investigation. 

Exuberant play, 280-288. 

Fairy stories, 315-318. 

Falling, 207-211. 

Family, see Father, Home, Mother. 

Fanny's First Play, 417. 

Father, 71, 76, 79, 133, 327; see 

Nurture. 
Father Jahn, 43, 314. 
Fighting, 193-201, 277, 279, 354, 

464-467, 494. 
Fishing, see Hunting. 
Florence, 388. 
Follen, Eliza, 146. 
Football, 1, 206, 319, 335 f., 342, 344, 

346, 348 f. ; see Membership. 
Fox, George, 422. 
French, 44, 68, 195, 205, 235, 271, 

357 ; witticisms, 356. 
Froebel, ix, xii, 3, 63, 79, 93, 104, 

119, 122, 163, 172, 302, 327, 328. 

384, 432. 

Galahad, 200, 306. 

Games, 126, 197, 200, 298, 328 f . ; 

see the several games by name. 
Gang, 350-380, 428, 449. 
Garrison, 422. 
German, 201, 372, 398; camp ball, 

38 ; dueling societies, 373 ; goods, 

387 ; mark, 355 ; nationality, 164 ; 

youth, 354. 
Germans, 164, 243, 314, 356, 368, 

372 ; ancient, 354 ; Herr Groos, 

5 ; upper classes, 378. 



INDEX 



497 



Germany, 43, 164, 199, 314, 387. 

Girls, 65, 123, 392^22, 473-475. 

Goethe, 138. 

Grasping, see Manipulation. 

Greece, 389, 442. 

Greek, 39, 40, 54, 163, 333, 334, 437, 

442, 456, 457 ; drama, myth, 419 ; 

processional, 477. 
Greeks, 162, 163, 164, 287, 418, 419; 

hetaireiai, 372. 
Groos, Karl, .\ii, 5, 9, 49, 60, 64, 126, 

143. 
Grown-ups, 70-73, 480-494. 
Growth, 5-7, 19-34, 57-61; and 

^ passim. 
Guild membership, 385-387. 
Gulick, L. H., xii, 6, 205, 214, 270, 

364, 397. 
Gymnastics, 42-47. 

Habit, xiii, 22-25, 27-34, 35-41. 
-fiall, G. Stanley, 177, 195, 301. 
Hamlet, 26, 312. 
Hand, 28 f., 89 f. ; see Construction, 

Manipulation. 
Harvard College, 473. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 383. 
Heidi, 306. 
Hephaistus, 261. 

Hercules, 10, 193, 195, 207, 261, 327. 
Herodotus, 456. 
Heroes and hero worship, 316, 324- 

327 ; see Big Injun, Chivalry. 
Hill dm, 198, 206, 297, 393, 395. 
Hockey, 206, 319, 393. 
Home, 121, 123, 132-137, 327 f., 400, 

407 ; see Father, Mother, Nurture. 
Homer, 376, 419. 
Hop scotch, 213. 
Horace, 39, 475. 
Horse, 128 f., 447, 448. 
Hughes, Thomas, 408. 
Hume, 185. 
Humpty Dumpty, 77. 
Hungers, xiii, 13-18. 
Hunt, Leigh, 408. 
Hunting, 465 f., 494 ; see Chasing. 

Ideals, 254-262 ; see Imagination. 
Imagination, 149, 296-318; see 

Dramatic age. 
Imitation, 36, 37, 111-116, 121-124; 

see Hero worship. Impersonation. 

2k 



Impersonation, 296-303 ; see Dra- 
matic age. 

Impulse, xui, and passim. 

Indian, 36, 129, 130, 239, 300, 354; 
West Coast, 420. 

Indians, 128, 205, 299, 347, 372, 377, 
443, 464. 

Industrial Training, see Apprentice 
age. 

Industrial work, side step of, from 
the direction of instinctive life, 433- 
445 ; remedy for, 446-479. 

Infancy, 5-12; see also 19-34, 62- 
70, 407. 

Instinct, xiii, 13-18, 66-69, and 
passim. 

Investigation, 175-185 ; see Curi- 
osity. 

Irish, 193, 350 ; dance, 421. 

Irishman, 468, 484. 

Iroquois tribe, 283. 

I spy, 237, 296, 297, 414 ; see Raid- 
ing games. 

Italians, 163, 164, 411, 468; Cinque 
Cento,. 450. 

James, William, 18, 67, 110, 126, 
149, 182, 286, 466; Psychology, 
87. 

Japan, 210, 377, 465. 

Jessel, Sir George, 359. 

Jesuit, 39. 

Jews, 350. 

Johnson, George E., xii, 37, 38, 
182. 

Josephus and Bohunker, 150. 

Juliet, 406. 

Jump rope, 213. 

Kant, 18, 185, 262. 

Kemble, Fanny, 416, 474. 

Keyscr, 53, 98. 

Kindergarten, 66, 138, 313. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 118, 179, 281, 343, 
355, 464, 490. 

Kirschcnsteiner, Dr., 387. 

Knights, 119, 302, 440, 442; of the 
Round Table, 373 ; see Bayard, 
Chivalry, Horse, Launcelot. 

Koran, 424. 

Kreutzcr Sonata, 417. 

Kropotkin, 417. 

Kuttenberg, 446. 



498 



INDEX 



Lamb, Charles, 315, 464. 

Language, 77 f. 

Last of the Mohicans, 300. 

Latin, 163, 193, 267, 268, 475. 

Launcelot, 127, 239, 303, 307, 336. 

Lawbreaking, 228-245 ; see also 

Gang. 
Leadership, see Teaching. 
Leech, John, 448. 
Lincoln, 24, 104, 119, 286, 390. 
London, 389, 468. 
London Bridge, 296, 389. 
Lorna Doone, 409. 
Loyalty, 65, 368, 319-479; of girls, 

400 f. ; see Membership. 
Luther, 162. 

Maine, Sir Henry, 456. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 194, 199. 

Manipulation, 84-94, 455 f. 

Mars, 195, 214, 261, 405. 

Marseillaise, 162. 

Massachusetts, minute men, 372 ; 

reform school, 225 ; training ship, 

182. 
Maternal instinct, see Nurture. 
Mazzini, 439. 
Membership, 13, 132-142, 159-163, 

164, 319-391, 423-432, 459 f. 
Messiah, 262. 

Middle Ages, 389, 395, 419, 464. 
Milton, 163, 388. 

Mind, 31-34, 492 f. ; see Instinct. 
Minerva, 261. 

Mischief, 169, 171, 182-185. 
Mother and mother play, 37, 72, 

74-83, 133. 
Mother Goose, 146, 151. 
Murray, Sir Gilbert, 419. 
Muscular Christianity, 408, 467. 
Muses, 160, 288, 317, 418, 473. 
Music, 98, 314 f., 367, 399, 419, 468, 

470, 474, 492 ; see Art, Rhythm. 
Myths, 316-318. 

Napoleon, 32, 484. 

Nature, xiii, and passim. 

Nature, Purpose of, xiii, and passim. 

Nausicaa, 38, 394. 

Negroes, 347, 468. 

Neighborhood, 380-385. 

Newell, W. W., 60, 296, 395. 

New England, 209, 



New Testament, 61, 422. 
Newton, 305. 
Nimrod, 238, 442. 
Nirvana, 155. 

Nurture, 13, 76, 217-227, 405, 456, 
494. 

Odysseus, 172, 353. 
Olmsted, F. L., 491. 
Olympic games, 348. 
O'Rell, Max, 44. 271. 
Orpheus, 160, 309. 
O'Trigger, Sir Lucius, 238. 

Paestum, 389. 

Pallas Athene, 261. 

Parthenon, 389, 487. 

Pasteur, 368. 

Patriotism, see Citizenship, Member- 
ship. 

Pegasus, 68, 114, 310, 409. 

Persian, 442. 

Persona, 139, 161, 351. 

Personality, 280-288 ; corporate, 
332 f., 347, 366; of the commu- 
nity, 321, 387-391; of the gang, 
351 ; of the ring, 139-141 ; of the 
school, 367 ; of the team, 335- 
344, 346 ; see Big Injun, Member- 
ship. 

Peter Rabbit, 113. 

Phidias, 98, 391. 

Philippines, head-hunting in, 467. 

Pickwick, 333. 

Pico dclla Mirandola, 450. 

Plato, 16, 138, 238, 382, 385, 391, 
418, 424. 

Play, xiii, and passim. 

Play instincts, xiii, 5-25 ; see Ap- 
prentice age. Chasing, Climbing, 
Construction, Creative instinct. 
Curiosity, Fighting, Girls, Hun- 
gers, Impersonation, Manipula- 
tion, Membership, Nurture, 
Reason, Rhythm, Running away. 
Striking, Team play. Throwing 
at a mark. Walking, Wielding. 

Playground Association of America, 
37. 

Plunkett, Sir Horace, 386. 

Plutarch, 112. 

Politics, as an expression, 474 f. ; 
see Membership. 



INDEX 



499 



Prisoners' base, 206, 296, 393, 414. 

Psalms, 150. 

Puffer, J. Adams, 350. 

Punch, 182. 

Puritans, 418, 473. 

Purposeful, 254-262, 286-288; play 

is purposeful, 246-253 ; subdues 

drudgery, 275 f. 
Puss in the corner, 198. 
Putnam, Dr. James J., 487, 488. 

Quakers, 194. 

Raids and raiding games, 347 f., 
352 f., 459. 

Raleigh, 278. 

Raphael, 61. 

Reason, ix-xii, 18, 262. 

Recapitulation, theory of, 64 f. 

Reflexes, 20 ; acquired reflexes sup- 
plement the instincts, 22-25, 30 f., 
35 ; see Habit. 

Rembrandt, 126. 

Renaissance, 68, 150, 163, 164, 
267. 

Rhythm, 143-165, 287 f., 4^5-421, 
457. 

Richter, Jean Paul, 314. 

Ring around a rosy, see Ring games. 

Ring games, 139-141, 143, 163, 320 f. 

Robin Hood, 306. 

Robinson Crusoe, 55. 

Rob Roy, 238. 

Roland, 193, 303. 

Rollo books, 315. 

Roman, 38, 54, 474; law, 456; 
lawyers, 359 ; master, 437 ; prae- 
tors, 456. 

Romans, 395. 

Rome, 112, 376, 390, 473, 487. 

Romeo, 406. 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 442, 464. 

Royce. 349, 368, 388. 

Rugby, 345 ; see Football. 

Rumbold, Charlotte, 299. 

Running and running away, see 
Chasing. 

Ruskin, 462. 

St. Augustine, 231, 232, 235, 241, 

372, 373. 
St. Francis, 422. 
Samurai, 377. 



Sand, 84 f., 91-98, 301. 

Sand garden, sand pile, see Sand. 

Santa Claus, 123, 167 ; and see 
96. 

Sargent, Dr. Dudley A., 393. 

Saul, 491, 492. 

Scaevola, Mutius, 390. 
.Schiller, 164. 

Schools, 366-368 ; see Teaching. 

Scotch, 368; ballads, 409, 421. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 68, 112, 377, 409. 
492. 

Self-assertion, see Big Injun age. 

Sentimental Tommy, 187, 302. 

Sex, preference, 123 ; see Girls. 

Shakespeare, 112, 124, 146, 299, 312, 
400, 406, 407, 421, 470. 

Shaw, G. Bernard, 223, 383. 

Sherman, 337. 

Sidney, Sir PhUip, 450. 

Sistine Madonna, 61. 

Skating, 210, 213, 398 f. 

Smith, Wayland, 51, 261. 

Soccer, 346 ; see Football. 

Social, 182-185, mischief a social test ; 
play of the dramatic age, 132-142 ; 
power of rhythm, 159-165 ; see 
Apprentice age, Civilization, Fight- 
ing, Girls, Loyalty, Membership, 
Mother play, Nurtxire, Teaching, 
Work. 

Soldier, 123, 302, 443 ; see War. 

Sparta, 370, 487. 

Spartacus, 451. 

Spartans, 195, 243, 370, 419. 

Specializing, 423 f., 426 f. 

,Spencer, Herbert, 60. 

Stecher, William A., 346. 

Stevenson, R. L., ix, 146, 221, 265, 
300, 357. 

Stoic, 456. 

Story telling, 306 f., 315-318. 

Striking, 14, 88, 205-207. 

Subordination, 254, 257 f. ; play im- 
plies subordination, 262. 

Suevi, 355. 

Sunday, 467, 476-479. 

Supervision, see Teaching. 

Surplus energy, play theory of, 60 f. 

Swimming, 396 f. 

Swinging, 148-151, 208. 

Swings, 212. 

Symbolism, 113, 314. 



500 



INDEX 



Tacitus, 383. 

Tag, see Chasing. 

Tartarin, 302. 

Teaching, 183 f., 215-217, 295, 331 f. ; 
artistic, etc., 469 f. ; implied in 
play instincts, 35-41 ; industrial, 
425-427, 453 f., 460 f . ; of Big 
Injuns by bigger boys, 324-327. 

Team play, 319, 335-349, 351 f. ; 
of girls, 400-402 ; see Membership. 

Teasing, 143 f. 

Thackeray, 15, 424. 

Thor, 195, 261. 

Throo-doep, 198, 206. 

Thring, Edward, 212. 

Throwing at a mark, 205-207. 

Tolstoi, 220. 

Tomboys, 392 f., 401 f., 408. 

Tom Brown, 227, 306. 

Tom Sawyer, 306, 493. 

Tools, 88-91, 180-182. 

Toys, not too many, 292 f . ; see 
bolls. 

Trade, see Apprentice age, Civiliza- 
tion, Guild membership, Industrial 
training. Industrial work. 

Trapeze, 212. 

Trollope, Anthony, 492. 

Turn Vereins, 43, 209, 314. 

Twain, Mark, 173. 

ValhaUa, 368. 



Valley Forge, 388. 

Venice, 229, 230. 

Venus, 405, 413. 

Vestal Virgins, 473. 

Vikings, 238, 266, 348. 

Vision, 308-318. 

Vogclweide, Walther von der, 395. 

Walking, 102-106. 

Wallas, Graham, 322. 

Walrus and the Carpenter, 150. 

War, 123 ; substitutes for, 466 f. ; 
see Fighting. 

Washington, Booker, 468. 

Washington, George, 119, 138, 325, 
366. 

West Point, 201, 373. 

Whistler, 126. 

Wielding, 88. 

William the Conqueror, 447. 

Wodin, 262. 

Work, xiii, 48-56, 427-432; re- 
stores, 486-489 ; see Civilization, 
Drudgery, Industrial training, In- 
dustrial Work. 

Yale, 370, 487. 
Y. M. C. A., 408. 

Zeus, 214, 262. 
Zulus, 347. 



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